The Busan New Port West Container Terminal Phase 2-5 project

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Busan, Korea’s no.1 port-maritime tourist city, has five ports, the Busan New Port of which is the country’s single biggest container terminal. The Busan New Port West Container Terminal Phase 2-5 project aims to build a container pier designed to enable large-scale container vessels to berth and handle container cargoes. This project is expected to lay the foundation for the Busan New Port to become a hub for maritime logistics in the Northeast Asian region.An unprecedented amount of construction materials and personnel have been funneled into the Busan New Port West Container Terminal Phase 2-5 project with an aim to build a “super terminal.” To this end, the construction site is striving to prepare for a possible increase in the working load of container cranes resulting from the enlargement of container ships and to enable outsized container vessels of 30,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) to berth.The manufacturing and installation of gigantic caissons was one of the most daunting challenges throughout the entire construction procedure. To deal with a lack of manufacturing space for caissons on land and cut down on time for moving and installing the completed caissons at sea, the construction site chose a method using a mega-sized floating dock. The ballast tanks located in its bottom sides can adjust buoyancy making it sink and float back by itself. As not deeply influenced by sea wave and weather conditions, it can maintain its level all the time, which led to resolving one of the biggest problems with maritime construction projects of “lost working days.”The construction site has been extra cautious about quality management. A crane rail foundation is an important structure which bears the considerable weight of containers during loading and unloading operations. Welding is considered critical in the successful construction of the crane rail foundation. To increase welding quality, the construction site made efforts with the support from the departments concerned. In addition, they gave a top priority to ensuring quality and safety by immediately conducting a boring investigation when they had to deal with the ground or strata, not predicted in the designing stage, during the pile driving operations.

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