Kennedy Railway Tunnel, Belgium

The renovation of the Kennedy Railway tunnel in Antwerp, Belgium will include the improvement of the fire safety and the renewal of electrical features. The project will consist of 2 phases. The first phase will be concentrated in the sunken part of tunnel, which is 510m long. A barrier of fire protection boards will be attached to the walls. PROMATECT^®-T proved to be the the ideal board for this specific application. Due to the fact that this tunnel has straight walls all along the length, this was an obvious chose. In the second phase the walls of the ramps will also be equipped with PROMATECT^®-T boards. Additionally an evacuation shaft and service staircase will be put in place, as of course safety regulations are much more strict in comparison to before. As they should be!

The PROMATECT^®-T boards are 17mm thick and will protect the concrete tunnel wall against fire for a period of two hours and withstand temperatures up to 1500°C (according to the Rijkswaterstaat curve). This means that boards will withstand temperatures of 1350°C on the fire side. To avoid that the concrete bursts and explodes, the temperature between the concrete wall and boards can not exceed 250°C. The test results for PROMATECT^®-T in the laboratory were spot on. To ensure that the same standards were met in the tunnel, Promat conducted a fire test with their system inside the tunnel. We were happy to say, the PROMATECT^®-T boards passed the test without any problems.

In total 11.000 square meters of PROMATECT^®-T boards were used in the renovation.