Williamsgate WTW
Forming part of the £300M West Cumbria Water Supplies Project, Williamsgate Water Treatment Works near Cockermouth will treat 80million litres of raw water from Thirlmere Reservoir every day. The project aims to provide a resilient water supply by linking West-Cumbria with the rest of North-West England following the Environment Agency’s decision to withdraw the abstraction licence for Ennerdale Lake by 2022.
The treatment works consist of four structures: The Rapid Gravity Filter Building (RGFB), the treatment water tank with 29 mega litre net capacity, the Flocculation Tank and the Inlet Building.
HAC (part of SOLID) have been appointed by Ward and Burke Construction to carry out the design of all the concrete structures which included coordinating the structure with the M&E installation.
The programme dictated that the concrete structures’ design had to be completed before the specialist M&E plant sub-contractors were appointed.
HAC (Part of SOLID) used a combination of strategies to assess complicated M&E plant loadings without fully developed specialist information. They actively built relationships with suppliers as early as possible in the process. This paved the way for seeking and finding information much earlier than the program would dictate. Similar installation were also analysed to establish loadings.
Crack control during early thermal shrinkage had to be very carefully controlled and monitored. The design and specification of the mass concrete structures had to balance the technical performance requirement with the economic viability of transportation distance and costs and carbon footprint.
To overcome the various challenges, HAC (Part of SOLID) designed a concrete pour sequence which was determined by a matrix of concrete placing temperatures, concrete thicknesses and seasonal variations to limit cracking to pre-determined technical requirements. HAC (Part of SOLID)’s experience informed the rebar design to ensure a solution which optimised the technical specification with the economic outlay.
