Piled foundation built for the first part of Crimea bridge (photo)

Piling for the foundation of 46 support structures for a highway and a railway between the shoreline and the Tuzla split has been completed at the construction site of the Kerch Strait bridge.  According to the Crimean Bridge information center, the foundation of this section consists of 700 bored and cast-in-place piles and 32 pipe piles.

Aleksei Sorochinsky, head of the construction sites at the Tuzla split, says the foundation of all railway support structures is made of bored and cast-in-place piles (8 to 12 for each support structure) with the foundation of the so-called bridge abutment made of 20 piles.

Support structures NoNo 1-19 for the highway section of the bridge have a foundation with 16 to 28 bored and cast-in-place piles each. Other support structures have a foundation made of pipe piles.

Bored and cast-in-place piles of the Crimea bridge are 1,200 to 1,500 mm in diameter and 24 to 57 m deep. They are filled with carcass and concrete. This type of piling is optimal for the Taman shore with its solid layer being relatively close to the surface.

Bored and cast-in-place piling of the Crimea bridge required over 27,000 cbm of concrete and 2,800 t of carcass. To ensure round-the-clock supply of construction materials, domestic production of reinforcement cage and mobile concrete-mixing plants were launched close to the construction site on the Taman shore.

All in all, the bridge foundation will number 7,000 piles including almost a thousand prism piles (400mm x 400mm), one of the key types of pile foundation applied in Russia, both in industrial and civil engineering.  They will be driven from the Kerch side featuring the most favorable geological conditions. Support structures in the area with the most challenging geological conditions will rest on the foundation made of pipe piles of 1,420 mm in diameter. Part of the pipe piles is driven at an angle for higher seismic capacity.