Assessment of terrain settlement at the airfield of Barcelona’s Prat Airport

The airfield is one of the key components for the operations and potential for growth of an airport. It is for this reason that in order for an airport to be competitive at medium and long term, it must have a high capacity and quality of terrain.

Azierta’s contribution consisted in the Technical Services for obtaining a deformation model of the terrain of the airfield through the evaluation of settlements using a great scale preloading test.

This is a research project that will be a reference and will provide invaluable information that will be essential for most of the extension works that are planned for Barcelona’s airport.

Because of the specific geological-geotechnical setting of Barcelona’s Prat Airport (soft soils of Llobregat Delta),a preliminary geotechnical test was conducted to continue with a full-size survey consisting in the execution of an embankment 180 m long and 80 m wide at the crown and a height of 4 meters.

During the civil works phase, Azierta’s contribution has been site management and execution of the preloading embankment, control of remediation, selection of suitable materials, arrangement, compaction of layers, refine grades, laying of anti-pollution geotextile fabric, placement of vertical strip drains, execution of drainage layers, etc.

In the last phase, a multi-layer deformation model adjusted to the sounding data yielded a settlement law that provides the pattern for the execution of the extension works of Barcelona Airport.