REVIEW OF THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE LUCINDA BULK SUGAR TERMINAL AT LUCINDA IN NORTH QUEENSLAND AUSTRALIA

摘要

This paper describes the present condition of the 5.76 km long Lucinda Bulk Sugar Terminal commissioned at Lucinda in North Queensland in 1978. The substructure of this facility consists of steel piles cathodically protected in the tidal zone and coated above water. The superstructure consists of a single lane roadway made out of prestressed concrete beams and a conveyor for the sugar made of coated steel and aluminium components. The roadway is only used to transport workmen to the ship loading facility off shore and is not used to transport sugar. This structure is currently 25 years old in 2003 and was first detected to be suffering alkali-silica reaction distress in 1982. Since 1987 significant information has been collected from this structure under a scheme initially devised by Gunnar Idorn of Denmark. The information collected on an annual basis consisted of transverse and longitudinal expansion data, concrete surface potentials, chloride ion profiles in the cover concrete and selected load testing of several spans of the roadway structure. The components suffering ASR distress were determined to be the prestressed roadway beams over the full length of the structure and the cast in place headstocks in the tail end structure. This structure consists of a tail end section of approximately 60 metres which ramps down to the high water mark and the balance of the structure over 5.5 km in length has at least 4 metres clearance above high water. It is concluded from this monitoring that the height above sea water and the early protection of the top surface of the roadway beams with a polymer modified sealer are two of the main factors reducing the rate of degradation of the beams. In addition, the load testing of the roadway spans indicates the structure is performing similar to an uncracked structure at this stage.