inform 05.2013 ( 4,07 MB)

Volume 9 No. 1 May 2013

Kuwait • Silver arrows for Kuwait – The biggest single order in the history of Duktus •

Switzerland, Italy, Germany • Not the right place for experiments – Ductile iron pipe systems for fire protection in tunnels •

Austria • Vienna gets a whitewater course – and Duktus is in on it too •

PAGE 2 | INFORM NR. 1 / 2013

ABOUT US

18 Looking ahead together – An interview with Hartmut Weber, the new chairman of the works council at Duktus in Wetzlar

19 Showing the latest pictures – New product panels for the Bildungswerk BAu in Gera Well trained – Pipe laying courses at Hagenbucher Anniversaries – Our congratulations to members of staff

3 Editorial PROJECTS

4 Silver arrows for Kuwait – The biggest single order in the history of Duktus – an interview with Peter Waßmuth

8 Vienna gets a whitewater course ... and Duktus is in on it too

9 A new pipeline improves nature protection – Laying of a new 4.8 kilometre long gravity pipeline in Bad Liebenzell The Riedleitung moves out of the way – Ductile iron pipes in use for the change of direction

10 Not the right place for experiments – Ductile iron pipe systems are essential for fire protection in tunnels

11 Getting ready for winter in the summer – Gerlos got ready for the opening of the 2012/2013 season

12 The first “Trenchless Day” in Lithuania – A crossing made below a main road by the HDD technique convinced an audience of professionals Horizontal directional drilling round the clock – A new pipeline for raw water to Berlin’s Wuhlheide waterworks

13 “TVERRAGA Kraftverk” – By cable car to the site in the Norwegian mountains

14 25 years of ductile iron piles – From Sweden via Austria to all over the world

15 Swift stability – Ductile iron piles provide safe foundations for the headquarters of funeral directors Bestattung Wien

16 Successes in the Slovak Republic – Duktus litinové systémy is supplying a drinking water project in the greater Bratislava area A NATO military training range is being supplied with drinking water – Duktus scores points with ZMu pipes

REPORTS

17 Waste heat – a valuable “raw material” – Duktus in Hall is feeding the waste heat from the cupola furnace into a district heating pipeline

Contents

ImPRInTPublished by: The executive managements of Duktus Rohrsysteme Wetzlar GmbH and Duktus Tiroler Rohrsysteme GmbHEditors: Dietmar Fischer, Iris Reinhardt, Elvira Sames-DickopfContributors to this issue: Thomas Aumüller, Alexander Bauer, Sieghart Berktold, Jerome Coulon, Steffen Ertelt, Helmut Gollreiter, Manfred Hoffmann, Petr Kopal, Thomas Laufer, Christoph Obkircher, Gerald Pasa, ulrich Päßler, Lutz Rau, Bjarte Skar, Erich Steinlechner, uwe Strich, Peter Waßmuth, Hartmut Weber, Andreas Weiler, Heinz-Jörg Weimer, Marc WinheimDesign, setting and litho plates: K13 Medien, WetzlarPicture credit/sources: Except where otherwise indicated, rights in photos, drawings and other representations are held by Duktus Rohrsysteme Wetzlar GmbH and Duktus Tiroler Rohrsysteme GmbHPrinted by: Druckhaus Bechstein, WetzlarEditors’ address:inform Sophienstraße 52-54, D-35576 WetzlarPhone: 49(0) 64 41- 49 14 90 Telefax: 49(0) 64 41- 49 14 97E-mail: [email protected]© Duktus Rohrsysteme Wetzlar GmbH and Duktus Tiroler Rohrsysteme GmbH

Next issue: November 2013

Vienna gets a whitewater course and Duktus is in on it too

FAIR AnD ExhIBITIOn DATES In 2013

hYDRO 2013 International Conference and Exhibition7 to 9 October 2013

Innsbruck, Austria

INFORM NR. 1 / 2013 | PAGE 3

ulrich Päßler Max Kloger Gerhard Wüest Stefan Weber

Editorial

The Zurich Durchmesserline mega project: laying the pipeline for fire-fighting water

Dear readers of inform, Very remarkable things sometimes happen – even in our industry. The most remarkable development in the past few months has probably been the Eu directive which is said to be needed to bring about greater privatisation in the public water industry. On the other hand, an up-to-date survey by the German forsa opinion poll-ing institute says that 82 % of Germans are explicitly in favour of the supply of water being organised by their towns, cities and municipalities. Anyone who has kept close track of past water privatisations in Europe will be able to see only a very few cases where any appreciable changes for the better have been achieved. Rarely has there been any evidence of increases in quality or reductions in prices. And a study by the university of Barcelona from 2010 says the same thing. There have been calamities too, and the privatisation in Great Britain which has become bogged down in a chaos of regulation, and the water losses still unchanged at the 20% level which are being suffered by suppliers such as Thames Water which have been resold more than once, are undoubtedly just the worst of these. There is virtually no evidence that privatisation of the public water industry produces any improvements in quality. Nor is it a thing that the population would welcome. And yet there is this initiative by the Eu commission. How can these two things be reconciled? One can get some idea of what the driving force behind this remarkable development might be, by noting that there is not a single representative of a public water supplier on the so-called Steering Group which advises the Eu Commission on matters of water policy. Almost without exception, the advice on European policy from the group comes from service-providing companies in the private sector. A courageous Citizen’s Initiative is opposing the planned Eu directive. Through the web address www.right2water.eu it has already collected more than 1.3 million signatures. There is nothing in any way objectionable about privatisation itself, provided it contributes to increases in productivity and to greater quality and econo-my. A bit more “get up and go” would certainly do many public institutions a lot of good. However, existing legislation means that nowadays it is very difficult in practice to change operating procedures in public administra-tions in a way that will affect their costs. Budgets are already under pres-sure in the public sector and what this usually means is that, while staff costs and expenditure on social insurance and so on continue to rise, what are seen as the steps which have to be taken to deal with this pressure, are the raising of prices and charges and the cutting of services and of the cost of materials and other non-staff costs. This is shown by, amongst other things, a study of November 2012 made by the consultants Ernst & Young. What has to be our major concern in the face of increasing privatisation in the field of public water supply is that this might be another area where this

21,000 metres of ductile iron pipes for Kuwait: loading the “silver arrows” in the port of Antwerp

trend will continue to grow. In plain language, what this will mean is smaller capital investments and cheaper materials! Being an industrial company which is dedicated to sustainability in the field of water supply, this is not a consequence that Duktus can approve of! Dear readers, please read this issue of inform and again convince your-selves from it of how Duktus is pursuing this principle of its corporate policy. And be sure to read our title story on page 4 about a fascinating project involving ductile iron pipes in a fascinating country, with fascinating women. This time it’s something really remarkable! Enjoy your read!

Yours very sincerely,


ThE BIGGEST SInGlE ORDER In ThE hISTORY OF DUKTUS – An InTERvIEw wITh PETER wASSmUTh

The production of the DN 1000 pipes for Kuwait began in late May 2012

“Kuwait is a modern country but at the same time a fairy-tale one, at least in my eyes”, says Peter Waßmuth, Area Manager Africa/Asia and Special Projects.He knows what he is talking about because he won his spurs with an order for Kuwait in 1989, when he was still a greenhorn in pipe exports. “At the time there had already been a business relationship between us for quite a few years be-cause shipments of pipes had been successful-ly made from Wetzlar to this country on the Per-sian Gulf back in 1980. It was the Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) who was the client then as well.

By June 2013, 21,000 metres of ductile iron pipes will have left the intermediate depot in the port of Antwerp for Kuwait

Silver arrows for Kuwait

Peter Waßmuth and the “silver arrows” in the open-air depot of the Ministry of Electricity & Water (MEW) in November 2012

At the time, the special climatic conditions in Ku-wait presented us with some major challeng-es as a pipe supplier, and the handling of the lo-gistics was not exactly an easy task either”, Pe-ter Waßmuth tells us. 30 years of business re-lations with the MEW has also meant 30 years of experience. Peter Waßmuth tells us why this is so: “Over the years, we have sent more than 83,000 tonnes of ductile iron pipes and fittings off on their journey from Wetzlar to Kuwait. The successes were groundbreaking, but we also suffered some setbacks, and we learnt a lot from these, which has helped us on future work. Pipes for Kuwait are subject to special condi-

tions, that’s how it was at the time and nothing has changed today.” Peter Waßmuth though has long ceased to be a greenhorn about Kuwait, he has become quite an expert on the Emirate and the extensive orders placed by it.When he started out as an export specialist he could not have dreamed that in 2012 he would be the man responsible for the biggest single or-der in the history of Duktus.He is the one who is best placed to tell us about this historic order and about the background and the work done with the Kuwaiti customer and that was why we interviewed him.

herr waßmuth, what is the background to the order and what is special about the supply of these pipes? “The population of the Emirate is growing at an average rate of 4.1% a year and between the 1990’s and today it has doubled. That is why capital investments in infrastructure projects are urgently necessary, particularly in the fields of power and water supply, transport, house build-ing and health care. Over the past few years Ku-wait has embarked on an extensive range of measures for these purposes. Our order is con-nected to a number of water supply projects which are contributing to this improvement in the infrastructure. Duktus is supplying a total of 21,000 metres of DN 1000 ductile iron pipes for a variety of applications plus around 4,000 fit-tings, together with gasket rings, tubular films to provide additional corrosion protection in asso-ciation with adhesive tapes, binding wire, and bolts, nuts and washers for the flanged joints. The pipes for Kuwait are ductile iron pipes of a special type suitable for use in the desert. On the inside they are given a cement mortar lin-ing (ZMA) plus a bituminous seal coat. This seal coat is a means of sealing the ZMA and it is needed because of the water that is conveyed


A total of 840 lorry loads were needed to forward all the pipes, fittings and accessories to Antwerp, the port of loading

through the pipes, which is desalted sea water containing sulphates. On the outside the pipes for Kuwait have a coat of metallic zinc and an al-uminium-pigmented bituminous finishing layer. The silvery sheen of this external coating reflects sunlight and reduces the extent to which the ductile iron pipes heat up when stored out in the open air. In Kuwait’s desert climate the tempera-ture may well rise to more than 50 degrees Cel-sius in summer. The silvery external coating has earned the name “silver arrows” for the pipes in-side the company and amongst other things it prevents the high temperatures from having any adverse effect on the cement mortar lining and its seal coat. All the coating materials and gas-kets are approved as suitable for use with drink-ing water for a water temperature of at least 50 degrees Celsius.”

how did this order come about?“If there were a headline above the answer to this question, it might well be “Good work takes time – two tense years”. It was at the end of 2009 that

we received the initial information on the new invi-tation to tender on work that the MEW Kuwait was planning. The MEW then drew up the invitation to tender in October 2010 and we obtained the rele-vant documents in December. After that it was up to us to get on with urgently preparing the tender, because the submissions had to be in by 15 Feb-ruary 2011. On earlier projects the evaluation was completed after three months and the order was placed no later than four months from the dead-line for submissions. With this project things were different. As early as February 2011 we learnt that we were the winners for the DN 1000 part of the specification and we were pleased that the de-cision had been made so quickly. But we were counting our chickens before they were hatched. What then followed was like the cliffhanger ep-isode in a novel with a happy ending because shortly after our “win”, the Kuwaiti government re-signed. Fresh elections had to be held and a new minister had to take up his duties at the Minis-try of Water. Because of the new government be-ing formed, the final decision on the placing of

the contracts had to be postponed. It is easy to imagine that we were rather apprehensive about this process given the size of the project. Today I can say that it was a real test of our confidence. But things got even worse. Early in June 2011, there was a new government in Kuwait, but in Au-gust 2011 it was compelled to resign again. There were long faces in Wetzlar and from September on there were the great fasts in the Muslim world. You have to know that although the Islamic clocks do not stop during Ramadan, the month of fast-ing, they do go considerably more slowly. And even economic decisions are not considered an exception. It is simply a question of being patient. Then, at last, Ramadan was over and from Octo-ber 2011 the contracts for supply could be pre-pared. In Wetzlar the mood brightened up. But only for a while, because the government re-signed for a third time and the planned placing of the contracts came to nothing. Once again, it was a matter of waiting, this time until March 2012, when a new government was formed and the minster responsible was appointed.

Pipes being loaded in the port of Antwerp in September 2012. From here, the container ships carrying the fittings take about four weeks, and the conventional ships carrying the pipes about six weeks, to reach the destination in Kuwait

Peter Waßmuth assessing the stowage and securing of the fittings in a 40-foot container


The pipes waiting to be used, stored in the open air depot. They are protected from the heat by their special external coating, which shines like silver and reflects the sunlight

Working to millimetres when pipes are being stowed in the ship’s hold The long journey is over – the pipes arriving at the MEW’s depot

We are now coming to the happy ending, be-cause in April 2012 Duktus found itself awaiting the invitation to the signing of the contract. More than two years had passed.The contract was finally signed on 28 May 2012. How fortunate this was, because in June 2012 the government resigned yet again. It is true that the Emirate, with its hereditary monar-chy but parliamentary system of government, was spared the Arab Spring, but the numerous changes of government reflect the constant al-tercations between parliament and the govern-ment and these latter sometimes have a crip-pling effect on economic processes. We saw the full effects of this. It is understandable that an audible sigh of relief went through all the floors and factory buildings at Duktus once the con-tract had been signed. The preparatory steps then clicked into place like clockwork.”

The implementation must have been a herculean task as well, or was it?“It cannot be denied that the strain on our nerves was excessive at times during this event-ful period, but the process of calming down af-terwards went off just as smoothly, as did all the handling of the contract, a task which our team at Wetzlar performed like true professionals. We organised the whole of the logistics right to the customer’s depot. This included holders and packaging for shipping and storage, such as containers, crates, specially labelled boxes, ma-terials for repairs, and tools.Duktus has been delivering pipes and fittings to the MEW in Kuwait continuously since ear-ly in September 2012. 440 lorry-loads of “sil-ver arrows” and around 400 loads of fittings and accessories, for the bolts alone 6 lorries were needed, these were delivered to the port of Ant-

werp as just in time deliveries to make up 15 to 20 ships’ cargoes. Shipping containers and oth-er items needed for packing had to be procured and hired. For easier processability and to opti-mise the processes where the special pipe lin-ing was concerned, a special tent was erect-ed for the winter months and extra workers were taken on.Logistics and delivery are one thing, but qual-ity assurance is something else, because the customer’s requirements are precisely speci-fied and have to be implemented, monitored and scrupulously observed within the company. All the steps taken to assure quality have to be documented and it has to be ensured that they can be tracked back to each individual prod-uct. Every consignment, including the associat-ed documentation, is checked by an independ-ent quality assurance company before it is des-patched. The MEW in Kuwait expects a repre-sentative of Duktus to be present on site for eve-ry delivery and to see to and monitor the local terms for transport, handover and placing in store. Only if there are no complaints does Duktus gets a confirmation of handover from the MEW.Our team in Wetzlar really surpassed itself. All the departments, starting with purchasing and continuing through production, technical plan-ning, servicing, sales and logistics have gone above and beyond their usual measure of com-mitment. For all the departments involved there were regular project meetings intended to op-timise the overall process and to ensure that quality requirements were met and reliability of supply maintained. They also provided general information on the progress of the project. There were additional project teams for specific are-as which were busy all the time and particular-ly when acute problems came up, the details of which related to particular technical areas. That we have managed to get it all done is cer-tainly a good enough reason for us to give our-selves a hearty pat on the back and say “Well done, Duktus!”

Silver arrows for Kuwait


The long journey is over – the pipes arriving at the MEW’s depot

how did the collaboration with the mEw go?“As I mentioned at the beginning, Kuwait is a modern country and the ways in which working processes are structured are modern too. Howev-er, the Kuwaitis are customers who think and act in a very traditional way and they make exacting demands for quality assurance and adherence to deadlines and, something that is typically Arab, they prefer the manufacturer to provide personal support and consultation. The contacts we have had for many years were of course a great advan-tage for us in this respect, so we can only praise the collaboration which took place. What might also interest readers is that it is a woman who is in charge of this project for which we are supplying the hardware. This is graduate engineer Shatha Al Tamimi, the director of Design Water Network

They are all working on this major project, which will be coming to an end in June 2013. l. to r.: Ms. Ing. Zainab (project manager at MEW), Dipl.-Ing. Steffen Ertelt (head of Duktus Applications Engineering Division), Ing. Shalan Al Shalan and Ing. Rashid Al Deqbasi (both project managers at MEW), Jehanbaz Ali (Gen. Director of Clic Service Industrial, the project managers in Kuwait), Keiichi Miyazaki (owner and CEO of Kuwait Nippon Associates Ltd Kunal, handling local logistics and supervision at the MEW) and Ing. Gamal Barbary (Chief consultant to MEW Design Dept. & head of inspection team)

Department – MEW. And there are also wom-en engineers working as project managers at the MEW. They wear traditional dress and are doing their jobs alongside their male colleagues. The way we worked with Shatha Al Tamimi deserves a special mention. As the head of the Design Wa-ter Network and Water Works Project Department at the MEW she is an important contact. She is an experienced engineer who has things well un-der control. We are very proud that we were able to present Shatha Al Tamimi in a short featured appearance at the International Women’s Day in Kuwait on 8 March 2013. She heads a team of project managers, one of which is Ing. Zainab, a young woman engineer, who is also responsible for our order. I am personally very pleased that Mrs. Al Tamimi is chaperoning this project and

that we are able to present her on the title page of this issue of inform. She has been with the MEW since 1995. In 2005 she took her masters de-gree in chemical engineering at the university of Kuwait and she is the mother of two children. By their work at the MEW, she and her team have made a major contribution to national develop-ment and special recognition of this fact is being made by the Kuwaiti government.What might also surprise our readers is that at the university of Kuwait alone 70% of the students registered are women. Women have had the vote since 2005 and they are also taking an active part in politics. This shows that Kuwait, despite being a conservatively religious society, is liberally orient-ed in comparison with its neighbouring states.Our experience in dealing with projects and in collaborating in all fields has been very positive, not least because we are long-term suppliers, so we know the customs and have been able to adapt ourselves to them in every regard.”

herr waßmuth, many thanks for this very informative interview!

Fittings stretching as far as the eye can see

Shatha Al Tamimi, director of the Design Water Network and Water Works Project Department at the MEW


82 metres of DN 600 pipes and eight DN 600 fittings were needed to lay the pressure pipeline for the whitewater course on the Danube Island

vienna gets a whitewater course... AnD DUKTUS IS In On IT TOO

Austria’s first artificial whitewater course is being built in Vienna. This whitewater course will be coming to this vast metropolis, or to be more ex-act to the Danube Island, the man-made island in the Danube in the centre of Vienna, and is being welcomed not just by professional sportsmen and women but also by fans of whitewater sports. The European whitewater slalom championships are to be held on this world class course on the New Danube as early as 2014. For Austria’s canoeists, a vision has become reality, and our colleagues at Hall are particularly pleased that Duktus could play a part in this splendid achievement and help with the design of an important part of it. Ing. Her-bert Preisl, vice-president of the Austrian Canoe Federation, explains how whitewater and Duktus pipes belong together: “The engineering of white-water courses is roughly the same all over the world. You build a channel where there is a differ-ence in height between the start and the finish, you set up obstacles on the bed of the artificial river and you get an adequate flow of water run-

ning through it. On the whitewater facility in Vien-na, which is part of the new watersports centre on the Danube Island, water will first be pumped from the New Danube into the 6,500 or so cubic metre capacity of the basin at the finish and will then be continuously pumped to and fro between the start and this finish basin. The 250 metre long competition course is situated between the two points. By regulating the flow of the water, it will be possible for a wide variety of activities such as rafting, canoe slalom, hydrospeed and freestyle all to take place on the course. To pump the water into the finish basin from the New Danube, a pumping station has been built on the right bank of the river. And this is the very place where the ductile iron pipes put in their appearance, be-cause there is water to be transported. This is the job of a DN 600 pressure pipeline which feeds the water from the New Danube at 1 cubic metre per second into the finish basin of the whitewater course, which is at a higher level of some 7 me-tres. In planning the course, there were various

constraints under water law and environmental legislation which had to be complied with in ad-vance and this meant that Vienna’s whitewater course was built as a ‘pumped channel course’. What this means is that the water, which is availa-ble in a basin of suitable size (the finish basin), is pumped into the start basin, which is at a 4.5 me-tre higher level, by three propeller pumps with a combined output of 12 cubic metres per second and then flows in free fall down the artificially con-structed riverbed. For as long as the pumps are switched on, this generates an artificially pro-duced flow of whitewater. The water has to be changed regularly about every two to three weeks. The pumping station and the DN 600 pressure pipeline are used again to do this. First however the whitewater course has to be drained. This can be done from the finish basin into the Danube even though there is almost no differ-ence in height.”The reason Herbert Preisl gives for opting for ductile iron pipes when the contract was placed for the pipeline, is the reliability of the pipe materi-al: “The Austrian Canoe Federation is thinking long term. The preparations for Vienna’s whitewa-ter project have been going on for more than 10 years. The intention is that the New Danube course will be used for a similar or even longer period than the so-called ‘Eiskanal’. This, the first of its kind, was built in Augsburg in 1972 as the venue for the Olympic whitewater disciplines and is still operating today. It was therefore an obvious decision to go for Duktus pipes. The possibility of compromising on quality and long life on this pro-ject was dismissed at the outset.”

Let us hope that the new competition course will bring further successes in canoe sport for the country where it has its home. With two gold med-als in the 2011 World Championships, Austria’s Canufederation is, after all, one of the most suc-cessful sports associations in the Alpine republic.

Corinna Kuhnle, Austrian winner of two golds at the Canoe Slalom World Championships, will certainly be making plenty of use of the new course. (photo: Balint Vekassy)


The 4.8 kilometre long gravity pipeline at Bad Liebenzell is being laid with Duktus sewer pipes (DN 300, ZMU)

A new pipeline improves nature protectionlAYInG OF A nEw 4.8 KIlOmETRE lOnG GRAvITY PIPElInE In BAD lIEBEnzEll

The federal state of Baden-Württemberg has pro-vided more than 1.8 million Euros as a subsidy for the laying of a sewage pipeline in the spa town of Bad Liebenzell. There was a 34-year-old pumping station whose operational safety and reliability no longer met present-day requirements and this cap-ital investment has allowed it to be decommis-sioned. It had repeatedly caused unpleasant inci-dents where some of the sewage had found its way untreated into the nearest stream and hence into the open countryside. “This new sewage pipe-line is making a considerable improvement in the protection provided for nature and surface waters”, is the comment made by Franz untersteller, Minis-ter of the Environment of Baden-Württemberg.The people responsible wanted to be on the safe side, so no discussion was needed when they de-cided that ductile iron sewer pipes with a cement mortar coating would be used on the project. The new 4.8 kilometre long pipeline runs through a sensitive FFH (Flora, Fauna and Habitat) area and an adjoining nature and landscape reserve. Be-cause of this, the pipeline has to meet the very highest standards of leaktightness and above all to satisfy the criteria for a long operating life. Here in

the north of the Black Forest, Duktus DN 300 pipes with their secure joints are seeing to it that the laying can be done in an economical and above all environmentally friendly way, because with ZMu (cement mortar coated) pipes the native soil can be re-used for backfilling. This was also considered to be a crucial advantage when the order was placed. The gravity pipeline runs from the Monakam pumping station to where it joins the

A great deal of effort was required to enable the laying of the pipeline to be completed in the short time required

DN 1000 ductile iron drinking water pipes with a cement mortar coating and BLS® joints were used when the Ried pipeline was re-laid in Raunheim in Hesse

The Riedleitung moves out of the way

existing sewer network in Bad Liebenzell. From the pumping station the sewage is fed on to the Tal-wiesen (Bad Liebenzell) treatment plant. The advantage of the new route followed by the pipeline is obvious: in future the sewage from vari-ous districts of the spa town will no longer have to be pumped over the mountain as it was previously, but will be drained away, reliably and economical-ly, round it.

The town of Raunheim in the Rhein-Main region of the state of Hesse is planning a large bypass road, part of which crosses the pipeline known as the “Riedleitung” or “Ried pipeline”. This pipeline is part of the regional supply system of water sup-ply company Hessenwasser GmbH & Co. KG. It transports drinking water from the extraction facili-ties in the south on the plain in Hesse known as the Ried to the areas supplied in the north and north-west in the Frankfurt am Main and Wies-baden regions. Every day, a volume of water of up to 120,000 cubic metres is pumped through the section of the Ried pipeline which is affected.

In the region of the crossing (which takes place at about 45°) an embankment is needed to carry the planned bypass, and this would have buried the existing Ried pipeline to a depth of up to about 5 metres. To avoid any risks, Hessenwasser decided to move a length of around 145 metres of its drinking water pipeline out of the danger zone formed by the embankment and to re-lay this part in ductile iron pipes. Because of the large number of changes of direction, Duktus pipes with BLS® joints were used. This meant that no concrete thrust blocks were needed. It was also possible for the existing excavated material to be re-used for backfilling because the pipes have a cement mortar coating. This will also ensure that they have a very long operating life. The op-eration of the Ried pipeline had to be interrupted to allow the new section to be connected into it. A great deal of organisational effort and hard work by their workers and staff were needed from all the parties involved to ensure that a supply of drinking water could nevertheless be maintained to customers over this period.

DUCTIlE IROn PIPES In USE FOR ThE ChAnGE OF DIRECTIOn


not the right place for experimentsDUCTIlE IROn PIPE SYSTEmS ARE ESSEnTIAl FOR FIRE PROTECTIOn In TUnnElS

Ductile iron pipes have been used for several dec-ades for pipelines carrying fire-extinguishing and fire-fighting water. There are important criteria which influence the decisions made by clients when select-ing the pipes and in most cases these are the high safety margins offered by the material of the pipes and the load-bearing capacity of the restrained joints under high internal pressures and possible pressure surges. Customers repeatedly ask for Duktus prod-ucts when they want properly functioning pipelines for fire protection which are themselves capable of withstanding a fire. The more than 400,000 metres of ductile iron pipes which have been laid for this ap-plication speak for themselves.Here we present four more projects where there was no question for the clients of using anything but Duktus’s superior ductile iron pipe system.

zurich’s Durchmesserlinie cross-city rail link – an xl size mega projectThe Durchmesserlinie cross-city rail link is Switzer-land’s biggest city-centre construction site. It con-nects the Altstetten, Zurich Main and Oerlikon sta-tions and is providing Zurich Main Station with the relief it needs from its traffic load and is allowing more fixed timetables to be achieved throughout Switzerland. Key parts of the Durchmesserlinie are not only the Zurich Löwenstrasse underground tran-sit station, but also the 4.8 kilometre long Weinberg tunnel. The southern wing of Zurich Main Station is a listed building more than 150 years old and the twin-

The bundles of DN 200 pipes were lifted in by a crane via the existing launch shaft

track Weinberg tunnel runs below it, the Hirschgra-ben tunnel and the river Limmat and opens into the Oerlikon cutting in an S-shaped curve. For fire-fight-ing purposes, a ductile iron pipeline for fire-fight-ing water has been installed along the entire length of the Weinberg tunnel. The pipes used were Duk-tus DN 200 pipes with BLS®/VRS®-T joints and a ce-ment mortar coating. The ability of the ductile iron pipes to be laid easily made laying rates of 250 to 300 metres a day possible. Hydrants have been in-stalled at intervals of 250 metres to supply fire-fight-ing water in the event of a fire.

Relief for a metropolitan area – the meran north-west bypass With the Meran north-west bypass, most of which runs underground as an underpass, the government of the state of South Tyrol has kick-started a project of the century. The bypass will relieve the town-cen-tre of a tremendous amount of its traffic and for this reason is also considered to have an environmen-tal relevance. So far, anyone who wants to drive into the Passeiertal valley or to Dorf Tirol generally has to learn to be patient. Cars inch through the residential area of Meran bumper to bumper. Once the north-west bypass is finished, it will be possible to get from its junction with the MeBo (the Meran-Bozen expressway) to the start of the Passeiertal valley in about four minutes. It was a good two years ago that the starting gun was fired for this ambitious undertaking. For part of the underpass, the Küchelberg tunnel, which is be-ing driven through the rock of the mountain of the name same, Duktus is supplying 2,200 metres of DN 200 ductile iron pipes with a polyurethane fin-ishing layer. The fire-fighting pipeline is being laid in a passage below the carriageways which also ac-commodates all the other infrastructural utilities. The work is going ahead at full speed and a large part of the fire-fighting pipeline has already been laid un-der the lead management of the Atzwanger Compa-ny of Bozen.

A pilot project with fully automatic fire protec-tion – the Jagdberg tunnel near JenaThe Jagdberg tunnel is the key part of what is known as the Leutratal valley bypass on federal Ger-man autobahn A4 between the Magdala and Je-na-Göschwitz junctions in Thuringia. The bypass fol-lows a new 11.8 kilometre long route which shifts the autobahn out of the ecologically sensitive nature re-serve formed by the Leutratal valley and this, togeth-er with the construction of the 3 kilometre long Jag-dberg tunnel, removes a very troublesome bottle-neck on the A4. The tunnel has two tubes which are respectively 3074 and 3070 metres long. They each carry three lanes of traffic and have emergency foot-ways on both sides. Duktus got an order to fit the 6,800 metre long fire-fighting pipeline out with DN 150 ductile iron pipes early in 2011. Because there could not be shown to be any alternative to the auto-bahn as a route for transporting hazardous goods, a fully automatic fire protection system was designed as a pilot project. DN 200 nominal size pipes were needed for this and the order was therefore amend-ed to this effect. Deliveries of pipes to the site began in February 2012 and all the laying work had been completed by the end of November. The pipeline passed the leak test without any problems.

The lifting gear on the towing tractor was used to lift the pipes into the utility channel in the Weinberg tunnel

In the Küchelberg tunnel, the fire-fighting pipeline is accommodated in a passage situated below the carriageways

In the Jagdberg tunnel, the pipeline for fire-extinguishing water is run in a channel next to the carriageways

A store of pipes in front of the western portal of the Jagdberg tunnel


Take-off pipelines and pipelines for air at the reservoir pondThe pumping station building built into the embankment round the pond

GERlOS GOT READY FOR ThE OPEnInG OF ThE 2012/2013 SEASOn

When it’s summer and winter sports enthusiasts are thinking about the destination of their dreams for next season, sleeves are being rolled up in the majority of ski resorts. Reservoir ponds are being built and trenches are being dug for the snow pipes which will be supplying the snow makers with water. This is because no resort is a desira-ble destination for international tourism in winter unless there is an almost 100% certainty of snow. It was exactly what happened in the ski resort of Gerlos in the Tyrol, part of the area known as the Zillertal Arena, which was making another mas-sive capital investment in extending its snow mak-ing systems. It is how the people there intend to live up to their slogan “Be sure of snow in Gerlos – not just a promise, a guarantee”. The operator, Bergbahnen Gerlos, has spent about 4 million Euros for this purpose. The motto it followed was “no pain, no gain” and that was why a new reser-voir pond was built on the Fußalm and why, in the summer of 2012, the pipe layer laid some 9 kilo-metres of new pipelines to supply the snow lanc-es on the ski runs. Duktus in Hall supplied the pipes. “For many years now we have been a relia-

ble partner supplying pipes to the popular Ziller-tal Arena. We’ve done the same for the latest op-eration in Gerlos, for which we supplied snow pipes of nominal sizes from DN 80 to DN 400 and pressure ratings from PN 40 to PN 100”, says Sieghart Berktold, sales manager for snow pipelines.Not only do the Duktus pipes provide the desired certainty of snow, but they can also be laid easily and quickly by the layers, who are generally em-ployees of the ski run operators themselves. This gives obvious economic advantages which, in the end, are of benefit both to the entire tourist industry and to the winter sports enthusiasts themselves. The ski resort of Gerlos now has three reservoir ponds with a capacity of around 200,000 cubic metres of water, a pipeline network some 23 kilometres long and 350 snow makers. Of the 90 hectares covered by the ski runs, 80 can be covered with artificial snow – which means that Gerlos is not far from achieving a 100% solution. The tremendously busy start to the 2012/2013 season showed that the decision to do the extension work was the right one.

Getting ready for winter in the summer

more peace and quiet for Schwäbisch Gmünd – a tunnel as a local bypassWhat is currently Germany’s biggest and most expensive road tunnel construction site is in Schwäbisch Gmünd and will shortly be coming to an end. This is the Gmünder Einhorn tunnel, which is intended to free the population of the second larg-est town in the Ostalbkreis district of Baden-Würt-temberg of the excessive traffic through the town centre. Some 35,000 vehicles a day drive through the town on the B 29 federal highway, the most im-portant traffic artery between Stuttgart and east-ern Württemberg, and people have been unhap-py about this for a long time. The Einhorn tunnel will make for greater peace and quiet and will re-move the bottleneck and the traffic jams to which it is prone. From the constructional and safety point of view, the 2.5 kilometre long tunnel is a relatively complicated structure compared with other tunnels. It skirts round the historic town centre of Schwäbisch Gmünd in a wide curve and in so doing has to cross below the river Rems and a railway line. At its deep-est point, the cover to the surface of the ground is some 120 metres. The single-tube tunnel carries traffic in both directions and is connected to a res-cue gallery by six cross-passages.Duktus ductile iron pipes with a Zinc-Plus finishing layer – totalling 3,990 metres in length - were select-ed by the client and planners and the wide safety margins these provide meet the latest safety stand-ards which apply in the Gmünder Einhorn tunnel. The fire-fighting pipeline is connected to the public drinking water network and 1750 metres of DN 250 ductile iron pipes with BLS®/VRS®-T joints were in-stalled for it. The rainwater which occurs is collected and pre-cleaned in a settling basin for rain upstream of the tunnel and a pumping station then feeds it along a pressure pipeline and into the river Rems, which acts as a receiving water. The drainage sys-tem in the tunnel and the pressure pipeline from the pumping station to the river Rems consist of ductile iron sewer pipes of different nominal sizes.

In the summer of 2012: measures to prepare for the laying of new snow pipelines using Duktus ductile iron pipes

Duktus BLS®/VRS®-T pipes for the pipeline for fire-fighting water in the Gmünder Einhorn tunnel


A nEw PIPElInE FOR RAw wATER TO BERlIn’S wUhlhEIDE wATERwORKS

An impressive demonstration of the deformability of ductile iron pipes

horizontal directional drilling round the clock

It because of the positive experience which the “Berlin Tiefwerder” operation had been for Berlin’s water supply company Berliner Wasserbetriebe that tipped the scales when it decided to employ the HDD technique again to carry out the laying of a new pipeline for raw water to the “Wuhlheide” waterworks and to use Duktus’s tried and tested ductile iron pipe system. The waterworks is within the city limits, but is situated in the region of a wet-land biotope and a drinking water protection zone.Duktus drinking water pipes of the DN 600 nomi-nal size (wall thickness K9) with BLS® push-in joints and a rugged cement mortar coating were used for the 276 metre long run of pipeline. After the drilling of the pilot bore and the upsizing oper-ations required, the Bohlen & Doyen company used pipe-by-pipe assembly to pull in the string of pipes continuously in 12 hours. Because of the very cramped conditions in the launch pit, situated between a waterworks building and the main ac-cess road on which there were other utility pipe-

The first pipe being pulled in by the traction headDieter Ludwig of the Duktus Applications Engineering Division instructing the employees of the drilling company

“It was some time ago that the idea first came to us of using an actual project to demonstrate the advantages of ductile iron pipes for trenchless laying to an audience of interested professionals in Lithuania”, explains Marc Winheim of the Duktus Applications Engineering Division at Wetzlar. He is now delighted to think that, after certain preparato-ry steps, it was possible to put this idea into prac-tice – with unexpectedly great success.In collaboration with uAB Industek, a retail suppli-er in the underground construction field which acts for Duktus in Lithuania, and Tractotechnik of Lennestadt, it was possible in October 2012 to turn the first Trenchless Day in Lithuania into a real event for trenchless laying techniques using duc-tile iron pipes. Two things played an absolutely crucial part in this success: the fact that a trench-less operation – the making of a crossing below a busy main road - was imminent in the town of Plungé in the north-west of Lithuania, and also the fact that the client had been convinced that ductile iron rather than HDPE pipes should be used.The weather was very bad unfortunately, but more than 100 guests still refused to be put off by the journey of more than 300 kilometres from the capi-tal Vilnius. The demonstration on the site enabled them to get a good picture of the ductile material and of the advantages of the HDD technique which was being used in this case. They were all impressed by the quick assembly of the Duktus DN 100 drinking water pipes and the trouble-free pulling-in done with the BLS®/VRS®-T traction head. And it was all done without any interference

to the traffic on the main road. The entire pulling-in of the 36 metre long pipe string took just 30 min-utes. The guests were very impressed by this, but what it did show as well was the great economy of the trenchless technique. “As well as the practice, we didn’t want to stint on the theory either”, says Marc Winheim, “and that was why we held an additional event on the same day which gave the guests an opportunity to obtain all the information they wanted and to have a lot of questions an-swered.” The first Trenchless Day in Lithuania

lines, there was no alternative to pipe-by-pipe as-sembly. Dieter Ludwig of Duktus’s Applications Engineering Division at Wetzlar provided compre-hensive instructions, and was there with the laying company to fit the traction head and assemble the first pipe joint. The assembly of the BLS® joints could be performed just as quickly and safely as the protection could be fitted to the sockets. Lutz Rau of Duktus’s field sales force in Berlin and Diet-er Ludwig spent several hours at the launch and destination pits by the side of the employees of the drilling company and this helped the project to be a success. This was an unusual approach, but meant that any questions or problems which came up could be solved straightaway.Twelve hours of work all in one go proved to have been worthwhile, the pressure test was passed at the first attempt and the tractive force required was nowhere near the 152 tonnes which would have been allowed. Nor was the whole of the al-lowable angular deflection (2° per joint) used.

The first “Trenchless Day” in lithuania

showed that there are a vast range of future pros-pects for trenchless techniques using ductile iron pipes, particularly in countries which are gradually embarking on improving their infrastructure. Al-though the main thing was not to make a special presentation of the ductile iron pipe, this was cer-tainly one of the attractions, an attraction which caused a few surprises: when an excavator drove over a DN 100 ductile iron pipe, the pipe did not shatter but simply deformed – as ductile iron is expected to.

The process of pulling in the 36 metre long pre-assembled pipe string

A CROSSInG mADE BElOw A mAIn ROAD BY ThE hDD TEChnIqUE COnvInCED An AUDIEnCE OF PROFESSIOnAlS


BY CABlE CAR TO ThE SITE In ThE nORwEGIAn mOUnTAInS

“TvERRAGA Kraftverk”

Between June and October 2012, a total of 2,000 metres of Duktus pipes (DN 600) were loaded onto lorries in Wetzlar for transport to the Nord-land region of Norway. They had to be split into 20 consignments. The distance from Wetzlar to the destination in the Far North was 2,200 kilome-tres. There you have the figures.The most spectacular part of the journey was the last one. The pipes to be laid at the source of the mountain stream called the Tverrag had to be carried there by cable car. In the end it was thanks to the first-rate planning by Duktus’s Norwegian sales and distribution partner DAHL Vannkraft that this went off perfectly, as did the logistics, handled by Lutz Cromm and Dirk Hofmann at Wetzlar.The ductile iron pipes with BLS® joints are part of the equipment for the Tverraga small hydroelectric power station. This station was planned by the Norwegian energy supply company Norsk Grønnkraft close to the town of Mo i Rana, not far from the Arctic Circle and has now gone into operation.

On-site installation training by Dahl VannkraftThe only way forward from the pipe store in the valley was by cable car

The terrain here is “alpine” and provided exactly the right conditions for using the flexible BLS® joint, which demonstrated how superior its proper-ties are for this application. Because of the difficult geological conditions, the company operating the power station had decided to order half the pipes as the cement-mortar coated ZMu version, based on the advice of DAHL Vannkraft.“The head here is tremendous and because of it we designed the bottom section of the pipeline for a pressure of 51 bars and for safety reasons we used Duktus pipes of wall-thickness class K12”, explains Bjarte Skar of DAHL Vannkraft. His col-league Gunnar ulvik pointed out what was special about the transport: “It was only the second time a goods-carrying cable car had been used in Nor-way, and this of course meant some extra cost and effort in terms of time and logistics. The way everything went off so well was just great and we were very happy with the flexibility that Duktus showed and that their deliveries were bang on schedule.”

There is a long tradition of using water power in Norway and it was the foundation for the industrialisation of the

country. Norway’s landscape is mountainous, split by deep valleys, so to create a system to supply the whole country with electri-cal energy, large and small de-cen-tralised hydroelectric power sta-tions were built, each supplying energy to a fairly small area sur-rounding them. This small-tier structure is still maintained today.Norway is Europe’s biggest producer of hydroe-lectric power and is the seventh biggest in the world, and it covers its own electricity demand

EUROPE’S BIGGEST PRODUCER OF hYDROElECTRIC POwER

Route followed by the turbine pipeline for the Tverraga hydroelectric power station

almost entirely from hydro-electric power. There are

plans to build more stations. However, at the moment there is another

reason why Norway’s hydroelectric power is becoming more important: the worldwide ener-

gy industry is looking for possible ways of stor-ing renewable energy and of having this availa-ble at short notice when required. A study by the Boston Consulting Group states that, due to the increase in the energy generated by solar power and wind, there will need to be a fourfold in-crease in storage capacity in Europe over the next 15 years. This being the case, Norway’s hydroelectric power is moving into the spotlight as a means of storing energy.


FROm SwEDEn vIA AUSTRIA TO All OvER ThE wORlD

25 years of ductile iron piles

Five million driven ductile iron piles have been installed, a figure which the Swedes Bertil Schmidt and Pentti Kosonen could not have dreamed of when they invented the ductile iron pile in the early 80’s at the AB Gustavsberg company. Ductile iron was completely unknown in special geotechnical engineering, nor did people see it as a very likely candidate. Initially, they underesti-mated the “G-Påle” and it was only felt to be justi-fied for underpinning inside buildings.It was as a result of the technology being trans-ferred (by a licence agreement) in 1986 between the Tiroler Röhren- und Metallwerke AG and AB Gustavsberg companies that the ductile iron pile reached Austria. As a result, it became known as a versatile idea for foundations, which meant relia-bility and speed. The success story began. In 25

A pile foundation for the “Akaziensteig” residential complex in Klingnau, canton of Argau, Switzerland

years, five million metres have been produced and have been used all over the world. Whereas in the early days the system met with scepticism and misunderstanding among pile-driving engi-neers, today they could not do without it all over the world. Ductile iron was and is the key to this success. The material was industrialised in the early 50’s and provides a simultaneous combina-tion of everything a driven pile system needs: ductility, impact strength, and corrosion resist-ance. Added to this, it has excellent castability. The conical plug-in joint is the most important means of connection and is produced, together with the barrel of the pile pipe, as a single casting; this makes things very much easier on site. The piles are produced in 5 m long sections, which makes for easy handling, and can be connected quickly right on the site without any welding or

special tools. This also allows the piles to be var-ied in length. The material of the driven ductile iron pile gives it a crucial advantage over rein-forced concrete and steel piles, an advantage which Duktus has made even greater over the past few years. A specially modulated ductile cast iron optimises the properties of ductility, impact strength and corrosion resistance for the driven ductile iron pile. The outstanding features which make this pile unique is the “Plug & Drive” plug-in joint. With them, another step has been taken in the onward march of quality.

Today, 25 years after the ductile iron pile was in-vented by the two Swedes, innumerable projects in Austria, Germany and all over Europe tell their own story. Wherever the foundation soil is unstable due to geological conditions, ductile iron piles will take care of safety. It is a notable fact that an entire factory was placed on ductile iron pile foundations back at the end of the millennium, when the pile was just 12 years old. It was the parts of the Buderus plant produc-ing brake discs in Breitenbach in the state of Hesse that was involved. Without ductile iron piles, they could not have been made stable on the wet riverside soil of the Perftal, in the valley of the river Perf. The building was up to 16 metres high and covered an area of some 7,900 square metres and to anchor it safely in the geologically difficult terrain, 350 driven ductile iron piles had to be driv-en into the ground. This was the only possible way of ensuring that the foundations would remain stable. The biggest project to date which Duktus has been able to implement with its well-tried pile system, was the refounding of the foundations of an industrial building in the Portuguese capital Lisbon. In 2007, around 60,000 metres of pile pipes were driven to depths of up to 60 metres there – a unique project to which a lot of space was devoted in the trade press.

Noise barriers in Crissier (VD) for SBB (Swiss Federal Railways)

Piles being used for a road underpass on the river Seine in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, France

Work on the foundations for the “Quest” residential complex in Wodonga (Victoria), Australia


In 2012, the Viennese funeral directors Bestattung Wien GmbH invested in a new headquarters which is sited in the Simmeringer Hauptstraße, the main road through Vienna’s Simmering district. Things had to be done swiftly, and the installation period allowed for the work on the foundations was only four weeks, after which the structure of the building was to take shape. In view of the soil conditions found in the terrain of the Simmering district, this was a real problem. The loess soils contain fine sandy silts and there was no guaran-tee of adequate safety for the foundations in them.

The driving of the piles for the foundation of the headquarters of Bestattung Wien GmbH had to be completed in just four weeks.

Pile foundations were the only way of solving the stability problem. “An absolutely crucial factor in Duktus in Hall getting the order to supply our duc-tile iron piles for this project was our ability to sup-ply exactly what was wanted at short notice and the fact that the equipment needed for driving our pile foundations could ensure that if any damage was done to the ground it would be limited”, is how Thomas Aumüller, head of pile systems, de-scribes Duktus’s success in getting the order. 331 pressure grouted ductile iron piles with different load-bearing capacities and of different diameters

Swift stabilityDUCTIlE IROn PIlES PROvIDE SAFE FOUnDATIOnS FOR ThE hEADqUARTERS OF FUnERAl DIRECTORS BESTATTUnG wIEn

had to be driven in the very short period of four weeks which was specified. It was thanks not only to the ease of handling of Duktus piles, which is known to be excellent, but also to NGT Neue Gründungstechnik Spezialtiefbau and their experienced project manager Friedrich Maier that this project for Bestattung Wien was com-pleted without any problems in the short time allowed. The construction of the building itself, for the overall planning of which Vasko + Partner Ingenieure of Vienna were responsible, was able to begin on schedule early in 2013.

Refounding of an industrial building in Bobadela (Loures), Portugal

Foundation work for the conversion and extension of Salzburg Central Station, Austria

Laying the absorber ducts in the driven piles and the floor slab, Salzburg Central Station

In times when energy prices are soaring, there is another interesting use that can be made of the driven ductile iron pile and one that has nothing to do with the transmission of structural loads – as an energy pile.More and more consumers rely on extracting geothermal energy by means of heat pumps and hence on being independent of oil and gas. For geothermal heat to be extracted, a medium has to withdraw heat from the ground. To do this, the medium has to penetrate deep into the ground over as large as possible a surface area and has to be brought back to the surface. This is a job for

which the ductile iron pile, having as it does the high thermal conductivity of cast iron, is tailor-made. In this application, the ductile iron pile is part of a technology which is only in its early days, but has great promise for the future, be-cause the CO2 reduction targets which are being aimed for in the future heating of buildings can only be achieved by increasing the use of renew-able energies. One example of this application of the Duktus pile system is Salzburg Central Station. When conver-sion work was being done on this, the most im-portant rail hub in the Austrian state of Salzburg, a

geothermal system was installed in 2010/2011 to cover parts of the heating and cooling demand. 440 energy piles each 15 metres in length and 22 geothermal energy probes each 100 metres long are seeing to it that considerable savings can be made on heating and cooling energy.

How successful the ongoing development of the Duktus pile system will be in the future is shown by the Abeinsa EPC company’s KaXu Solar One project, a 100 MW solar power plant in South Africa. We shall be featuring a detailed report on this in the next issue of inform.


In spite of the ice and snow, good progress was made with the laying work even in the winter months

Successes in the Slovak Republic

Work is constantly being done in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, on improvements of all kinds to its infrastructure but particularly to its infrastructure for drinking water. Between 2010 and 2012, Duktus had already supplied DN 1000 ductile iron pipes for the first stage of the Po-dunajské Biskupice – Bernolákovo drinking wa-ter supply project. An order has now been won for the third stage of the project too. “For this, it was a great help to us that we had taken on two new employees for the Slovak Republic region, Dr. Mária Zidorová and Mario Hikaník, who were introduced in the last issue of inform. These two colleagues with their contacts and together with the wholesalers Asuan of Košice, made a crucial contribution to this success. For us at Duktus li-tinové systémy, this infrastructure project in Brati-slava is a prestige project because it is also one in the public interest – the investor is the Bratis-lava Waterworks company.”, we are told by Petr Kopal, CEO of Duktus litinové systémy in Beroun. Because of the local conditions, the requirements to be met by the pipes and fittings were very de-manding, but this is no problem for Duktus prod-ucts. A drinking water pipeline is going to be making a considerable improvement in the sup-ply to the north-eastern part of the greater Brati-slava area, and the scope of supply for this con-sists of 3,390 metres of pipes of various nomi-nal sizes. 2,652 metres of these ductile iron pipes

are fitted with BLS®/VRS®-T joints and 972 me-tres have a cement mortar coating. The first de-liveries began in November 2012 and Petr Kopal is sure that the laying can be successfully com-pleted by the summer of 2013, especially as the resident engineer on the project has been en-thusiastic in his praise of the ease of assembly of the Duktus pipes and has stressed the advan-

tages they have over the competition. “It was a pleasure to hear that, and even now there is an-other success that we can chalk up, on the com-pletion of stage 3, we will be supplying DN 600 drinking water pipes for another pipeline meas-uring around 10,000 metres in length. So things are progressing in the Slovak Republic”, Kopal is happy to say.

DUKTUS lITInOvé SYSTémY IS SUPPlYInG A DRInKInG wATER PROJECT In ThE GREATER BRATISlAvA AREA.

DUKTUS SCORES POInTS wITh zmU PIPES

A nATO military training range is being supplied with drinking water

To the west of the Bulgarian town of Sungurlare in the Novo Selo district there is a NATO military training range. To supply the troops stationed there with drinking water, the Ministry of Region-al Planning has pushed ahead with the laying of a drinking water main. At the same time this will also be supplying six municipalities in the area around Sungurlare and this will ensure a good supply of drinking water, which had not been adequate in the past. The capital investment by the government is being translated into reality by the planning company Vodokanalproekt. A large part of the main is being laid in DN 300 and DN 400 ductile iron pipes. 11,210 metres of Duktus pipes are being supplied for this, all with a cement mortar coating (ZMu).The project, involving over 11,000 metres of ductile iron pipes, is one of Bulgaria’s larg-er drinking water projects and underlines the market presence of Duktus in south-east Eu-rope. “The demand for infrastructure services

in south-east Europe is going to be very large in the next few years. The reason why Duktus ZMu pipes were selected in this case was the saving on bedding material, which meant some major economic advantages for the client”, we are told by Andreas Weiler, head of Sales Inter-national at Hall in Tirol.One section of the main crosses below an im-portant traffic artery and a river. For this section, the planners decided to use the horizontal di-rectional drilling technique and use ductile iron pipes with BLS®/VRS®-T joints for the trench-less laying. Once again, it was the reliability of this joint system which showed the Duktus pipes to have the edge over others. Even before this, the Duktus team convinced the investor and the planners of how superior BLS®/VRS®-T pipes are and how straightforward they are to lay. The project is due for completion late in 2013. As things stand at present, the installation will be finished on schedule.

Roland Kröpfl (second from right) with the team giving on-site training in laying in Novo Selo, Bulgaria


waste heat – a valuable “raw material”

The future of the energy industry lies in efficient supply systems and sensible partnerships. With this in mind, the energy supplier TIGAS Erdgas Tirol GmbH, together with its co-operating part-ners in industry and local authorities, has set up a regional district heating grid. This is intended to make heat from different heat sources in the re-gion available to the local population and compa-nies in the central area of the Tyrol from Innsbruck to Wattens. The climate-preserving future for the Tyrol region began on 4 December 2012. This was the day when the district heating grid be-tween the two places officially went into operation. (A report on the preparatory measures for it ap-peared in the first issue of inform for 2012.)The district heating pipeline, which is 16 kilome-tres long at the moment, is able to supply more than 10,000 households with reliable, clean and convenient heat. This innovative project relating to the energy infrastructure is costing 20 million Eu-ros. Operating and expanding it will enable con-siderable reductions to be made in the central area of the Tyrol in the emissions of fine dust haz-ardous to health and in greenhouse gases dam-aging to the environment. Three partners of TIGAS are contributing to this successful scheme by no longer allowing their waste heat just to go up in smoke and instead feeding it into the new supply pipelines. One of these partners is Duktus in Hall. There it has been Helmut Gollreiter, head of Technical Planning, who has been tackling this project for more than two years now and who has controlled all the preparatory measures taken inside Duktus.We interviewed him on how things stand at the moment, on the advantages which there are for Duktus from this project and on future develop-ments.

Herr Gollreiter, before we come to the current situation, we would like to ask you a rather pro-vocative question. This Tyrolean project is a

The replacement of the cooling towers for example is planned in the second stage of expansionDuktus board member Max Kloger at the commissioning of the district heating grid on 4 December 2012

DUKTUS In hAll IS FEEDInG ThE wASTE hEAT FROm ThE CUPOlA FURnACE InTO A DISTRICT hEATInG PIPElInE

showcase project for energy efficiency, but be-fore it went into operation was the valuable waste heat from the cupola furnace in the found-ry really just being allowed to go up in smoke, or in other words wasted?“Absolutely not; up till then we had already been using the waste heat as energy for heating our buildings on the factory grounds. However, in practice its use in this way was confined to the part of the year when heating was needed be-cause the thermal energy could not be used in production processes.”

Let’s turn to the current situation. The district hearing grid has been doing its stuff since 4 De-cember 2012, which is almost six months. What successes were chalked up over this period?“We were feeding energy in even before 4 De-cember 2012. We had been feeding waste heat into the TIGAS network since as long ago as Oc-tober. From then until the end of March this year we were able to feed in a total of 3,600,000 kilo-watt hours of thermal energy. That’s a marvellous result and is equivalent to the replacement of about 360,000 cubic metres of natural gas, which in turn means that the Hall in Tirol region was saved from around 700 tonnes of CO2.”

There is no question about the achievements in respecting the environment, but an industrial concern has to think and act profitably. What advantages are there for Duktus as a partner in the district heating grid?“There are very big advantages. In the first place you have to appreciate that virtually all the capital investments in the project were made by the net-work operator itself and Duktus is able to sell its waste heat at a normal market price. And we can even take heat from the network ourselves. Com-pared with what happened previously, this means that our operating costs are lower at times of the year when a lot of heating is needed, but for the

rest of the year we can obtain additional income by selling waste heat that was previously unused. The effect of this for us is that we save twice.”

What proportion of the households are supplied by Duktus?“Around 2,000 households can be supplied with heat by our infeed alone. Apart from the advan-tages that result for Duktus, we are of course proud to be able to do something to improve the energy balance and the emissions situation in our home region.”

Herr Gollreiter, has the project now gone into your out-tray or are there plans for the future?“The district heating grid is a long way from going into my out-tray. There is to be a second stage of expansion and in this stage there is to be another considerable increase in the quantities fed in. The extension line to downstream of Innsbruck is not quite complete yet. Further efforts are needed to get this done, but these will have to be made chiefly by the network operator.”

Many thanks for the information, Herr Gollreiter!

Helmut Gollreiter, head of Technical Planning at Duktus in Hall


An InTERvIEw wITh hARTmUT wEBER, ThE nEw ChAIRmAn OF ThE wORKS COUnCIl AT DUKTUS In wETzlAR

looking ahead together

Hartmut Weber has been chairman of the works council at Duktus in Wetzlar since 1 January 2013. He took over from Norbert Lewalter, who was retir-ing. Birgit Walker was elected Hartmut Weber’s deputy chairwoman. Hartmut Weber was born in Wetzlar and trained as an electrician at the then Hessische Berg-Hütten-werke AG. After his training he worked for Philips in Wetzlar. In 1991 he joined what was then the Buderus Aktiengesellschaft at its Wetzlar works. until he was elected, he held a post in the mainte-nance department’s electrical workshop. The 54-year-old has been a full member of the works council at Duktus since 2006.

Herr Weber, first let me just congratulate you on being elected chairman of the works council! Were you surprised by the result on 1 January 2013?No, it wasn’t a surprise at all, really. If the result had been a great surprise to me, I wouldn’t have put myself up for election in the first place. It goes without saying that anybody who puts himself up for election hopes that the response will be a posi-tive one.

There is always a certain conflict of interests in relationships between corporate management and a works council. Nevertheless, they are both putting their shoulders to the same wheel, name-ly to make the company viable for the future in consultation with all the employees and hence safeguarding jobs, and also increasing employee satisfaction. One person can’t achieve anything unless the others help. How do you see future collaboration and what do you think can be said on the question of employee satisfaction?What the works council is striving to do above all is to increase the satisfaction of the employees, both male and female, and to do its bit to ensure that jobs can be maintained. Of course, it has to be

clear to both sides that with a task like this, suc-cess is only possible if the collaboration between management and the works council is based on mutual trust. The future will show whether this col-laboration between the two will last on the every-day practical level.

Duktus has two sites, Wetzlar and Hall. How do you see the future from the point of view of colla-boration between the two works councils?Basically, we here at Duktus Wetzlar have a very positive attitude towards collaboration with the works council at Hall, but what we also feel is that we should deal with one another fairly and frankly. It’s something that has to become standard practice for both sides. We were very pleased that Armin Eberl, the chairman of the works council at Duktus in Hall, paid us a visit on the 13th of February on the occa-sion of the meeting of the Duktus supervisory board. Together with my deputy Birgit Walker, we had an agreeable exchange of views and we want to strengthen our contacts in future.

Are there regular contacts between you and your colleagues in Hall?unfortunately, there has been rather a falloff in contacts over the past few years. We are now in a phase of getting together more closely. The visit by Armin Eberl which I just mentioned certainly helped with this. We want to again put the focus more on “Growing together” and also to give our new members of the works councils at both sites an opportunity to get to know each other personal-ly. It is true that there are no actual plans for mutu-al visits with inspections of the works included at the moment, but it is certainly something we’ve already started thinking about.

The Duktus works council for the Wetzlar site (l. to r.): Hüseyin Kesir, Daniel Drescher, Birgit Walker (deputy chairwoman), Andreas Mantz, Hartmut Weber (chairman), Siegbert Hofmann, Jacqueline Bablich (representative for youth and training), Roderich Boos, Paul Fuchs. Not shown in the photo is Jose Recio Benito

You now have the responsibility of representing employees’ interests. What potential do you see for improvements in communications between the works council and the workforce?In my view there has already been an improve-ment in communications between the works coun-cil and the workforce, this may possibly be be-cause, up until the end of 2012, I was still working on site as a maintenance engineer so I know most of the employees personally. More members of the workforce are again coming to the works council to ask for help and advice. In all the decisions that may arise, we shall be endeavouring to keep our eye primarily on the interests of the employees.

You are as it were ushering in a new era, which opens up prospects for the company and the workforce. Would you like to tell us what your vision is for the future?For the future, our main concern is to improve the existing situation and, jointly with the workforce, to get us moving forward. None of us can see into the future, neither the management, nor us on the works council. We can only hope that together we shall make the right decisions for the company’s constant and continuous progress. Another major concern of the works council is to maintain the existing social welfare provisions at Duktus. These include the company’s provident fund for employ-ees and the assistance with funeral expenses which was organised by the works council. Both of these are welfare perks for our colleagues and thus constitute a motivating factor. May I take this opportunity to give an assurance - and I am speaking for the works council when I say this – that even in these economically and socially difficult times the works council will always do eve-rything it can to ensure that the workforce receive fair and reasonable treatment.

Herr Weber, many thanks for talking to us.


Anniversaries

Duktus Rohrsysteme wetzlar Gmbh

40 years with the company Name geändert, 1.7. 2013Sigrid Lettau, 1.8. 2013Silvia Müller, 1.8. 2013Arslan Akin, 4.9. 2013

25 years with the companyYusuf Cavusoglu, 1.7. 2013Peter Markiewicz, 1.7. 2013Andrea Kühn, 1.8. 2013Silke Hackl, 1.8. 2013Carmen Schäfer, 1.8. 2013Dirk Weber, 1.9. 2013Michael Sorgner, 1.9. 2013Jan Cyron, 26.9. 2013Joachim Leks, 3.10. 2013Peter Schmidt, 10.10. 2013Rüdiger Hofmann, 17.10. 2013

Duktus Tiroler Rohrsysteme Gmbh

25 years with the companySiegfried Künig, 1.2. 2013Martin Haller, 1.9. 2013Alfred Kweton, 2.11. 2013

OUR COnGRATUlATIOnS TO ThE FOllOwInG mEmBERS OF STAFF

Showing the latest pictures

A group working on the radiusing and post-treatment of a spigot end Practising the connecting of pipes to fittings

“Since November 2012, there has always been something to remind us of Duktus on our way to the workshops”, says Volker Krautheim, head of the Gera centre of the Bildungswerk BAu Hes-sen-Thüringen e.V., the association of construc-tion industry training centres in Hesse and Thur-ingia. What he is pleased about are the seven new display panels attractively designed by the Duktus marketing team of Elvira Sames-Dickopf and Peter Meltzko which show the range of duc-tile iron pipe system products. The panels have been put up in the spacious corridor which leads to the workshop for the pipeline installers – a good place, Volker Krautheim thinks, because it means that every trainee has a chance to see them. There has been a long association be-tween the Bildungswerk BAu (BiW) and Duktus and both sides benefit from this association be-cause the people who receive training and ad-vanced training at the Gera centre are, amongst others, pipeline and sewer installers. It is therefore a good thing for Duktus to assist the BiW with lectures, training courses and materials to work with. In this way youngsters just starting their ca-reer and people being given advanced training become familiar with the ductile iron pipe systems and the many things that can be done with them, as we are told by uwe Strich, a sales manager at Duktus, who had brought the panels over to the BiW. In Gera, the second largest town in Thuring-ia, the BiW has its home in a complex of listed buildings where up to 530 trainees find ideal con-ditions for taking training and advanced training courses. For the trainees there are 150 places available on theoretical courses and 380 on prac-

The training given at the BiW to become a pipeline installer is particularly well thought of

Uwe Strich (on the right), Duktus sales manager for Thuringia, presented the panels. On the left: Falko Müller, a training instructor at the BiW

tical courses. The training for pipeline installers is particularly well thought of. Instructor Falko Müller had this to say on the subject: “Our well-estab-lished practical training course for underground construction workers, which concentrates on pipeline installation, lasts two years and conveys the fundamental knowledge needed for this tech-nically very demanding vocation”. Falko Müller is particularly proud of the fact that the Gera Train-ing Centre of Eastern Thuringia will this year be entering a team of future pipelines installers for the “WorldSkills International” competition. This event of worldwide scope in the vocational train-ing field will be taking place in Leipzig from 2 to 7 July 2013. The most skilled youngsters will be appearing there not just to become champions but also, in very general terms, to provide others with a motivation for getting good training. “Even at this stage we are wishing the team every success and maybe there will be a title popping up for them at this international meeting”, says uwe Strich.

nEw PRODUCT PAnElS FOR ThE BIlDUnGSwERK BAU In GERA

well trainedPIPE lAYInG COURSES AT hAGEnBUChER

On two dates in February 2013 there was a lot to learn at Hagenbucher, Duktus’s sales and distribu-tion partner in Switzerland. The 33 people taking the courses were full of praise: “I’m further along the road now”, “A super course!”, “I’d like to come again”, “There was a lot that was new to me so all the info was very helpful”, were just some of the many comments on the pipe laying courses which were held on two days in Eglisau. The courses provided pretty much everything about the theory and practice of laying ductile iron pipes and ended with the presentation of certificates to those taking the courses.

Practical work with cement mortar coated pipes and BLS®/VRS®-T joints

Duktus S.A.

Innsbrucker Straße 51 6060 Hall in Tirol Austria

T +43 (0) 5223 503-215

www.duktus.com

Duktus Rohrsysteme wetzlar Gmbh

Sophienstraße 52-54 35576 Wetzlar Germany

T +49 (0) 6441 49 2401 F +49 (0) 6441 49 1455

www.duktus.com

Duktus Tiroler Rohrsysteme Gmbh

Innsbrucker Straße 51 6060 Hall in Tirol Austria

T +43 (0) 5223 503-0 F +43 (0) 5223 43619

www.duktus.com

Duktus litinové systémy s.r.o.

Ružová 1386 252 19 Rudná Czech Republic

T +420 311 611 356 F +420 311 624 243

www.duktus.com

Duktus Pipe Systems FzCO

South Jebel Ali Free Zone JAFZA View 18/Office No. 909 Dubai/u.A.E.

T +971 (0) 4886 56 80 F +971 (0) 4886 56 40

www.duktus.com

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