Glebe Island Silos

Client – Cement Australia

Facility Manager – Sydney Ports Corporation

Design Check By – Maunsell

Structural Design - Connell Wagner

Location – Glebe Island, Sydney

Project – To strengthen 4 silos to enable them to be filled with cement. (The existing silos were designed for grain only strong enough to be half filled).

Andersal Site Supervisor – Eddie Issa

Special Challenge – Cement Australia run a very tight OH & S regime because of the inherent safety risks in working in an operating industrial cement storage facility.

The silos had to be cleared of existing compacted cement and cement dust prior for personnel working internally in the silos.

An access door had to be cut into the silos above the concrete new base to allow access for the steel fixers, form workers and concreters.

Solutions:

Main Silos

Jacques Calluaud designed a special “helicopter” to air blast the silos from top to bottom to remove compacted cement from the silo walls.

We manually shoveled 50 to 100 tonnes of dry contracted cement powder from each silo.

We used a cement Australia crusher to break up the hardened lumps so the product could be recycled.

We removed the 16 air slides from the base of each silo to clean them and to prevent damage.

We cut a door sized access hatch into the silo and erected an access platform.

We then had the tasks of constructing a 4m high x 300mm thick reinforced concrete ring internally in the base of each silo.

The new ring was anchored to the existing by dowels epoxied in to the existing. These dowels then had 2 layers of s16 circumferential and vertical steel reinforcement installed followed by form work and pouring of the internal annulus.

Following concrete cure the form work was removed and the access opening reinforced using rebar continuity couplers and then concreted up.

Footings

We constructed 2 new footing per silo.

We reinforced 8 existing footings with 6 layers of Carbon Fibre (Each layer gave the equivalent strength of 50mm of concrete)

We also repainted the area above the site access to restore it to its heritage conformity.

We completed 4 silos in 6 months. (There are another 8 that may be reinforced in the next few years)

In total about 200 cubic metres of concrete was used.