Tensar helps Hungarian road programme

With Tensar SS biaxial geogrids the contractors have been able to gain full access to the sites, and progress the highways despite unfavourable weather

While Hungary has started on an ambitious highway building programme to improve its infrastructure, the programme faces considerable cost and time problems because of inherent geological problems with weak soils and high water tables.

With Tensar SS biaxial geogrids the contractors have been able to gain full access to the sites, and progress the highways despite unfavourable weather and saturated soil conditions at the beginning of the construction season.

The majority of the land area of Hungary comprises flat, fertile plain, composed mostly of loess loams over glacial clay; the country also has a weather-dictated construction season from spring through autumn.

With 220 km of new highway - M6, M7 and M35 - due to be built in 2005, heavier than usual spring rains threatened costly delays to progress, as the photograph from the Lake Balaton area shows.

In the autumn of 2004, several trial sections of highway had shown that Tensar SS geogrids with granular fill solved three problems faced by the contractors.

The geogrids gave constructors full access to the site for heavy plant, provided a drilling stable platform to enable vertical drains to be installed and ensured a fully reinforced base for the embankment on which the highway is constructed.

The layers of Tensar geogrid and fill created an efficiently drained stiff platform, which allowed work to continue as if on dry loadbearing ground; some 2 million sq.m.

are scheduled to be laid for the road programme in 2005.

Depending on the exact local conditions, light geotextiles were also installed over the sub-base in some areas to prevent fines migration into the granular fill.

Use of Tensar SS geogrid solutions offers time and cost savings compared to conventional methods of providing stable soil conditions for construction and infrastructure projects.

In addition, the solutions can often be achieved with poor quality or local fill materials, so minimise the amount of high quality, granular fills that may have to be extracted and transported considerable distances.

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