Wirtgen Recycling Technology Saves Cost And Energy In China's Xi'an

Wirtgen's high precision recycling and spreading technology reduces the amount of material required and yields a faster project completion on Xi'an's major axial road reconstruction.

Beijing, China (October 14, 2009) /ChinaNewswire.com/ — By using Wirtgen's Streumaster high precision spreading technology for cold recycling of the road surface, together with a Wirtgen WR 2500S Recycler, a Hamm 3625HT single drum compactor, and a Voegele S-1803-2 wheel paver, the Xi'an Management Bureau was able to make major savings in energy and costs when widening and resurfacing Chang'An Nan Lu, the main north-south axial road in the historic city.

China has been using cold recycling of road surfaces for some time and traditionally the stabilizing agents are spread manually. The recycling of the surface of Chang'An Nan Lu required around 11,100 tons of cement. Using the manual spreading method, a total of 444,000 25 kilogram bags of cement would be required. Since it takes around three hours to load and unload a truck load of 800 bags the total time just to load and unload cement bags for this project would be 167 days, or seven months.

For the Chang'an Nan Lu project the Xi'an Management Bureau used a Wirtgen Streumaster SW16 MC mounted on a SX3255DR385 truck from Shaanxi Automobile Group. The tank for the stabilizing agent in the SW16MC has a capacity equal to approximately 20 tons of cement. Since the cement is pumped directly from a silo truck into the Streumaster's tank, and it takes just 30 minutes to fill the tank, this reduced the total time required to load the 11,100 tons of cement on the Chang'An Nan Lu job to around 28 days. With a spreading width of 2.46 meters and spreading the stabilizing agent at a speed of 1.5 kilometers an hour the Streumaster took approximately 10 days to spread the cement on the total area of 370,000 square meters. Thus the total duration of the project was reduced to around 38 days compared to an estimated 137 days using manual methods.

Besides this huge saving in time and costs, the Streumaster improved efficiency on the job since the stabilizing agent could be spread just when it was needed and there was no need to consider weather changes such as rain, which would have forced the jobsite team to cover all the bags if they had been placed manually.

Another very important cost saving advantage of using the Streumaster was that – in accordance with regulations from the Chinese authorities on recycling jobs – when using bagged cement (in this case a 5% mix), the contractor has to add an additional 1% of cement to the mix to compensate for stabilization agents that are lost by being blown away by the wind, or are wasted by poor accuracy of spreading on the road. When spreading the cement using the Wirtgen Streumaster this additional 1% was not required, which made it possible to save a total quantity of 1,850 tons of cement with a cost saving of CNY740,000 and concomitant savings in fuel and energy costs resulting from the reduction in the number of truck journeys required.

Speaking about the project, Mr. Gang, the managing director of the Xi'an Municipal Management Bureau, said: "Our government strongly emphasizes environmentally friendly recycling projects with construction waste reduction and sustainability. Sustainability and reuse are our targets. The recycling market has just begun. As more and more companies consider recycling in their future projects, the recycling market will become bigger and bigger."

"The characteristics of municipal road repair and maintenance are busy traffic, many job sites, limited working time, and the need for high quality. It follows that the requirements for machines include reliability, less breakdowns, easy operation, and simple service and maintenance. In essence, machines from the Wirtgen Group meet our construction requirements." Mr. Gang added.

The Wirtgen Group is an internationally operating group of companies in the construction machinery sector incorporating four traditional brands: Wirtgen, Vogele, Hamm, and Kleemann. As a technological leader, they offer their customers mobile machine solutions for road construction and road rehabilitation, as well as for mining and processing minerals. In 2008, with its workforce of more than 4,500 men and women, the Wirtgen Group generated consolidated sales of 1.5 billion Euros.

The Wirtgen Group has been present in China for more than 20 years and since 2004 has operated an assembly factory in Langfang, Hebei Province. With more than nine branches and 200 employees, Wirtgen China are always close to their customers.

www.wirtgen-china.com.cn