The impending Olympic Games in Brazil are transforming the metropolis of Sao Paulo, with marked effects on the city’s road network. In the southern part of the city, the “Chucri Zaidan” urban plan includes various real estate developments, as well as infrastructural projects providing roadway, environmental, and social improvements. As part of this plan, two new bridges – Laguna and Itapaiuna – were built in the district of Marginal Pinheiros, and ULMA Construction took part in both projects. With an investment of R$305 million, the bridges will greatly ease traffic both to and from this historically congested area.
The Itapaiuna Bridge is a three-lane overpass stretching 340 m in length, which will alleviate traffic conditions in newly built residential areas. Facing the impossibility of building conventional shoring systems on the ground, with a distance of 113 m between riverbanks to span, the construction firm ODEBRECHT decided on a construction system as cost-efficient and lightweight as possible. In coordination with headquarters, the ULMA Construction Brazil engineering team developed a solution employing our CVS cantilever formwork carriage, a flexible, high-performance system with a high load-bearing capacity and capable of adapting to varied deck widths.
Apart from the actual river, the area is characterised by poor ground quality, a constant flow of heavy traffic, and various urban obstacles, all of which required ULMA‘s engineering team to design a variety of technical solutions for the formwork system. It was necessary, for example, to build various raised accesses in order to allow both vehicular and rail traffic to continue throughout the entire construction process. MK trusses more than 15 m long, set between MK shoring systems 10 m in height, created a structure that allowed construction to be undertaken without interrupting the local transportation network in any way. Both components are part of the MK System, offer high load-bearing capacity, and can be configured to accommodate the demands of any project. In areas with lower load-bearing requirements, braced aluminium ALUPROP’s were used to form the shoring system.
Independent from the structural elements of the construction system employed, ENKOFORM HMK bridge deck formwork adjusted perfectly to the varied deck widths along the entire 340 m length of the bridge.
In addition to supplying more than 1,400 tonnes of equipment, ULMA Construction also provided engineering services covering implementation, pre-assembly, on-site assistance, and supervision throughout the project.