Design optimisation of temporary working-platforms

Temporary working-platforms have significant cost implications in the construction industry. Working-platforms are required on almost every infrastructure project either for piling-rigs or for mobile/crawler-cranes, to lift up and install structural components. The cost associated with the material and the resource needed to build working-platforms is significant. Further, these costs increase if a platform fails and a crane or rig falls over. More importantly there are extreme health and safety issues associated with such an event. Incidents of this nature are not uncommon in the industry as often platform designs are not acquired or corners are cut during platform construction. In global literature there is little research into temporary working-platforms performance and design. Therefore current design methods are considered to be conservative by practitioners and thus expensive to build. This paper describes a study that has been carried out to investigate the performance of a temporary working-platform. The platform has been designed and built with state-of-the-art geotechnical monitoring instrumentation installed. Instrumentation includes pressure cells to measure loads imposed and transferred through the platform, shape accel array and settlement plates to monitor platform settlements throughout its lifetime, during typical construction operations. The project set-up and preliminary data from the instrumented platform trial are summarised in this paper. This research will aid in future design of safe, cost effective working-platform construction.