12 Apr VIASFALT lays asphalt pavement for the expansion of the Barcelona Container Terminal (TCB) yard, Spain

VIASFALT, a Grupo Copisa company, is tasked with laying SMA (Stone Mastic Asphalt), a solution featuring increased resistance to cracking and buckling compared to conventional asphalt mixtures. Due to the high stress to which the Terminal pavement at the South Pier in the Port of Barcelona is subjected, a working group was set up led by Grup TCB engineers, together with the design engineering firm (IDOM), the fibre supplier company (Rettenmaier Ibérica) and in partnership with the laying company (VIASFALT), to design a pavement with specific solutions in the asphalt roadway layers and treatment for the yard top layers. This reduces investment by 14% compared to conventional asphalt roadway solutions while also cutting maintenance costs. The pavement is being laid on roads in the 24 new hectares which under the expansion plan will become part of the Barcelona Container Terminal in the coming months. In lockstep with this upgrading, the TCB expansion project carried out by COPISA and VIASFALT includes extending the mooring line by 150 metres up to a length of 1,515 metres, setting up two separate accesses for the entry and exit of cargo to the Terminal and installing six automatic doors fitted with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. After these measures have been put in place container movements are expected to increase up to a capacity of 2.3 million TEUs.