In 2016, the Joint Stock Company “Donaerodorstroy” reconfirmed its leading position in the South of the country in adopting cutting-edge road building technology.

This time the Company’s employees were the first among the region’s companies to implement new solutions in reinforced concrete protective structures ensuring enhanced road safety. Implacable heavy statistics of human victims and economic losses of the country related to road safety require pro-active solutions, including those connected to constructions reliably preventing transport clashes on the roads.

One of these solutions is to construct reinforced concrete Jersey barriers on federal highways. This barrier separates opposing lanes of traffic and ensures high stability of the construction in accidents with high speeds of vehicles. In summer 2016, the “Donaerodorstroy” Company employs this solution to a very busy section of the M-4 Don Federal Highway between Rostov-on-Don and the border of the Krasnodar region.

For those not in the know, a collision with the concrete construction may seem frightening. However, studies show that the reliable prevention from clashing with the opposite traffic saves lives. This type of collision with the security barrier usually happens tangentially to the traffic direction or with a slight angle to the traffic direction, and the barrier is not just secure protection for transport vehicles from dreadful frontal crashes, but it also aligns the direction of the vehicle collided with it. Indeed, the reinforced concrete barrier never gets bent, has high stability and enables a vehicle to move along the barrier, gradually lowering kinetic energy of the moving object and keeping it on its original track and also preventing it from leaving the emergency traffic lane.

Thus, chances of a rollover crash, a collision with opposing or meeting traffic get lower. To reduce time needed to build the reinforced concrete median barrier and to cut down financial expenses of the project, the “Donaerodorstroy” Company used a concrete placing technique with sliding formwork, with technological and technical support from the representative office of the Gomaco Corporation in the Southern Federal District – Lonmadi Rostov.

The technique made it possible to escape from producing the barrier in prefabricated reinforced concrete. This technology enables to reduce metal consumption of the construction, to use concrete more effectively and to ensure simplicity and reliability of the construction. At present, local roadbuilders lay, on average, 1km of separation barriers per shift.

After examining the global practice in engineering and constructing barriers of this type, the shareholders and managers of the “Donaerodorstroy” Company came to a decision to purchase a Gomaco 4400 barrier paver. This customized high-performance test-operated machine to construct barriers makes it possible to install sliding formwork symmetrically from both sides of the machine.

The Gomaco 4400 machine with a pre-installed 3D Leica geodetic system allows constructing the reinforced concrete median barrier at the design level quickly, accurately and efficiently. Switching to promising technologies, technical solutions and their fast adoption emphasizes continuous superiority in quality of the Joint Stock Company “Donaerodorstroy” and the engineering school of the Don region in road construction.

D. A. Mikhaylov