Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

MABA Fertigteilindustrie GmbH is one of the biggest manufacturers of precast concrete components in Austria and can look back on 90 years of history. The company’s core business areas are structural and industrial engineering, railway and road construction, as well as tunnelling and other civil engineering activities. The company has been active on the market since 1925 and has a staff of 500 employees. MABA has belonged to the Kirchdorfer Group since 1984 and has been expanding in Eastern Europe for 25 years. The enterprise puts its proven experience in manufacturing precast into practice on a daily basis in producing high-quality prefabricated system components for its customers. These precast components are manufactured by MABA on an individual basis. Its production always remains directly linked to the current order situation. This demands great variability in manufacturing to be able to produce the components required just in time. All individual production processes have to mesh seamlessly with one another so that the system can function smoothly. The supply of concrete or production of reinforcement should not cause any bottlenecks in the manufacturing sequences. In fact, the output performance of these sub-processes should exceed those of the circulation system involved so that the latter’s maximum capacity can be exploited. As regards reinforcing work for double walls, MABA is breaking new ground by integrating the Korbwand system from Rapperstorfer Automation in its production line. This production system allows steel cages for concrete elements to be made individually with robots. The Korbwand reinforcement cage is composed of two reinforcing steel meshes, one for the inner and the other for the outer shell, similar to classic double-wall reinforcement. With a classic double wall, lattice girders assure the proper spacing between the two mesh layers and hold the shells together during concreting at a construction site. At this point, the Korbwand’s setup differs greatly. Instead of lattice girders, there are single tension and compression bars that give the Korbwand the stability it needs during manufacturing in a production facility and later at a construction site.