What are the characteristic of HZ combi-walls?

The race to transport containers and bulk cargo worldwide has led to an increase in the depth of major ports and the need for heavier berth facilities. To cope with these deeper structures, conventional steel sheet piles were replaced by "HZ combi-walls”, which consist of two complementary elements: a primary element (king pile) and a secondary element (middle steel sheet pile).

This is the content list:

What is the HZ combi-walls?

What is the history of HZ combi-walls?

What are the characteristics of the new HZ combi-walls?

What is the HZ combi-walls?

The new "HZ combi-walls System" is a composite wall system containing two elements:

HZ combi-walls king pile, a new type of wide flange beam with specific flange geometry.

AZ filled sheet piles, hot-rolled RZD/RZU and RH profiles are connected to infill plates and HZ King piles to ensure wall continuity.

The overall concept of the HZ combi-wall is based on hard piles with lightweight intermediate sheet piles, thus forming an overall safe, cost-effective and high bearing capacity retaining structure with high rigidity and high moment bearing capacity.

What is the history of HZ combi-walls?

Aware of the inevitable development of the main application areas of traditional steel sheet piles, Luxembourg began to produce HZ combi-walls systems in the 1970s. Soon, the system became the first choice for the construction of new dock walls in major ports in Germany, Italy, the United States and many emerging economies.

In the late 1990s, the development of AZ steel sheet piles led to improvements in the system: new HZ combi-walls of different thicknesses were introduced, and new filled AZ steel sheet piles were introduced. The HZ combi-walls system has achieved unparalleled success and is still used in most large ports, deep foundation pits and deep watertight cofferdams in the world. The shipment of HZ combi-walls system has been confirmed in the past few years.

At the beginning of the 21st century, this trend continued to develop towards large ships. It is expected that the load on the berth will continue to increase in the future. Several new large ports are in the planning stage, and most existing ports are expanding their capacity. These investments will require the implementation of a large number of new dock walls and deepening of the existing dock walls. New applications require larger high-capacity retaining walls.

What are the characteristics of the new HZ combi-walls?

The HZ combi-wall is equipped with four HZ combi-walls King piles, each of which can be rolled to a different thickness. For each HZ part, six different "solutions" are proposed. The main improvement of the HZ composite wall steel pipe pile is the concave geometry of the flange of the lighter HZ combi-walls profile and the unparalleled thickness of the flange of the heavier King pile.

Insert the RH/RZ connector and mill a groove in the flange. The design of the milling equipment ensures very tight tolerances. It can improve the minimum interlocking hook connection and ensure sufficient residual steel thickness.

In addition, the HZ combi-wall is driven by piling equipment guided by a fixed guide. The guide must obtain the correct driving angle in the direction of the pile axis and achieve correct positioning by simply driving the guide rail horizontally. When stacked in water, the latter is fixed on the auxiliary pile above the water level, and in all other cases, it is placed on the driving platform and fixed.

HZ combi-wall also has the following characteristics:

Long without connector

Compared with LSAW and seamless pipe economical

A variety of sizes to choose from

Use high-grade coils

Provide anti-corrosion protection before delivery

Kings wall advantage

Increase wall stiffness