Roads and motorways

Soft soils on the sides of the roadways resulting from excavation need stabilizing to secure the infrastructure and mitigate the risk of sliding. The Reinforced Earth® technology is widely used throughout the world for more than 60 years and allows for building safe, resilient and flexible structures that can be single-tier or multi-tier, such as vertical retaining walls. Reinforced Earth® can accommodate different types of backfills using steel or geosynthetic soil reinforcements. Retaining walls can also be designed and built using precast retaining walls such as T-Wall® or TechWall™.

Geoquest offers various options for the construction of enbankments using geogrids. Given the constraints, we can provide engineered solutions for:

• Embankments over soft soils
• Embankments over piles
• Embankments over subsidence and void bridging

Mastering soil conditions and long-term behavior under traffic is of outmost importance when building a road, especially when dealing with poor soil conditions and low bearing capacity. Our range of geogrids associated with our engineering expertise can help build roads under the most challenging conditions while reducing costs, construction time and assuring long-term performance of the pavement.

In fact, compared to traditional road construction methods, using geogrids would allow you to reduce the necessary excavations and volumes of aggregates to be used to build flexible and resilient pavements. Our wide range of high-performance geogrids will allow for a better control of long-term behavior of the infrastructure and reduce the maintenance costs over the service life of the structures.

Whether crossing rivers or cutting through mountainous terrain, passageways can be achieved building arch bridges, cut and cover tunnels, wildlife crossings or buried bridge structures that can be single or multi-span. The TechSpan® precast concrete arches are a proven solution with a wide range of standardized arch profiles available reaching up to 22m span, and even larger spans for special projects.

On our precastarches.com website, which is dedicated to TechSpan®, you can download our full catalogue of shapes in .pdf format. The website also offers the possibility to use the TechSpan® Design Tool to quickly calculate the optimal arch shape for your next project and to download it in .dwg AutoCAD compatible format.

Our TechSpan® arches for the construction of arch bridges and tunnels can also be coupled to Reinforced Earth® spandrel walls as part of a completely integrated and engineered solution for which our engineers have years of design experience and numerous project references.

Each project is unique and presents given characteristics that may be related to aspects such as engineering and site constraints. In a continuous effort to design the most adapted solutions, Geoquest also offers the possibility to use TechBox™ precast concrete boxes for the design and construction of box bridges.

The transition from roadway embankment to a bridge can come in many forms. Our retaining wall solutions are widely used for the construction of access ramps. Bridge abutments are considered critical structures, and our solutions are well suited in addressing load distribution and settlement. Whether pile-supported or fill-supported, bridge abutments are dependent on confined stabilized soil. Our earth retaining solutions are ideal in addressing conditions that are specific to each bridge application.

With the constant increase of traffic, roads often require widening to increase their capacity. Whether there is enough space available or existing embankments on the roadsides, our retaining wall solutions will allow to increase the width of the roadway while ensuring the continuity of service of the infrastructure. Our TerraLink® shored retaining wall solution has proven to be an excellent option for road widening applications, allowing to link a new structure to an existing one.

Our geogrid made solutions will allow help you to expand your road quickly when dealing with soft soils presenting low bearing capacity in an economical way, reducing the necessary excavations and volume of aggregates to be used.

Highway construction often requires temporary shifts of traffic during phasing and staging of the works. Geoquest’s TerraTrel® and GeoTrel® temporary wire mesh Mechanically Stabilized Earth (MSE) retaining wall solutions allow for easy handling and installation, with the same load-carrying capacity as precast concrete faced walls.

Building access ramps and elevated structures call for measures to ensure the safety of road users. Our precast traffic barriers and crash wall systems allow for robust connections along the walls that is proven through full scale crash testing and numerical modelling. Several types of safety barriers can be constructed integrally with our walls and made available as part of our offer:

• Parapets
• Traffic barriers
• Guardrails
• Handrails

Building roads and motorways nearby residential areas can imply noise disturbance for the inhabitants. Our StresTec™ post-and-panel sound walls can be installed in areas of low height clearance and our FanWall™ free-standing sound barriers can be mounted without deep foundation elements.

Precast panels can be customized with architectural finish allowing designers and architects to add a touch of art to the structures.