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The Borough of Croydon is visibly developing into one of South London’s most up-and-coming residential districts. Many new apartments are being built here, with one of the latest projects being the 25-storey residential development “Altitude 25”. Set to be Croydon’s tallest building and a defining urban landmark, this 82 m elliptical tower will comprise 235 residential units when completed. Contractors Foundation Developments Ltd. are using the new Xclimb 60 protection-screen system to ensure the safety of the slab-forming operations.
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20 protection-screen units from Doka are in action safeguarding the slab-forming operations on the Altitude 25 project. The loading platforms make it easier to transport equipment up to the next floor.
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20 protection-screen units are in action on the “Altitude 25” apartment tower in Croydon, enclosing the top four floors at a time, so as to safeguard all the slab-forming operations on the structure shell. This room-high enclosure provides complete protection around the accident-prone edges of the floor-slabs where edge falsework and column forming operations have to be carried out. Made of trapezoidal sheet, the protection-screen system not only protects the site crew against falls, but also against inclement weather. In a safe, “feel-good” working environment like this, it’s no surprise that the forming operations move ahead much better. To facilitate shifting the floor-slab formwork up to the next floor, the protection screen comes with three integral loading platforms. From these, the formwork equipment is lifted by crane to the next forming level.
Xclimb 60 can either be lifted and reset by crane, or by handy portable hydraulic units. Either way, the vertical profiles of the protection screen are guided up the side of the structure in positioning shoes, permitting safe, fast and efficient weather-independent repositioning operations even when wind-speeds of up to 72 km/h (45 mph) are experienced. As the site crane was already working to capacity, it was decided in London to go for the hydraulic option. The way the system works is simplicity itself: Completely demountable cones are embedded in the concrete around 50 cm in from the edge of the slab. Floor-mounted supports that transfer the vertical and horizontal forces from the protection screen into the floor-slabs are fixed to these cones. The positioning shoe, in which the vertical profile is travelled upward, is then fastened to the floor-mounted support with a second cone screw. Now the manually repositionable hydraulic cylinder plus lifting mechanism is clamped onto the vertical profile with just one turn of the hand. The hydraulic cylinder is braced against the positioning shoe during the lifting operation, pushing the vertical profile with its hook-like projections (and with it, the entire protection screen) up in 30 cm jumps. This lifting sequence is repeated as often as necessary until the entire protection-screen unit has been raised to the next storey. One hydraulic unit and four hydraulic cylinders are all that is needed to raise two protection-screen units at the same time. Following this, the hydraulic cylinders and the hydraulic unit are taken to the next protection-screen units, and attached there. In this way, the 83-m-circumference enclosure on the Altitude 25 project is climbed one storey upwards in just one day. During this climbing operation, the formwork to the in-situ concrete slabs can stay in place, which greatly speeds up the construction workflow. FDL-Project Manager Matt Callaghan puts it like this: “The Xclimb system gives our people the ideal protection while they’re working on the floors under construction. The hydraulic lifting operation means that the crane stays free, so in the meantime the team can get on with the job of pouring the columns at the slab-edges, using concrete skips.”
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| Vertical and horizontal forces are transferred into the floor-slabs in such a way that the vertical loads are always sustained by the previous slab which is older and thus has higher load-bearing capacity. |
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