Concrete Admixtures For the Sports Arena of Campus Sursee

Campus Sursee, a training center for building specialists in the Swiss canton of Lucerne, is extending its facilities with a modern sports arena as a training location for ambitious professional athletes and a leisure facility for private visitors. The concrete for the new building complex was optimized using admixtures from Master Builders Solutions.

Sursee in Switzerland, a small town with almost 10,000 inhabitants in the canton of Lucerne, is a place of learning in many respects: there is a vocational training center, a secondary school, the second-largest high school in the canton, and a training and advice center for the dairy industry, domestic science, and agriculture. The town also has the largest educational and seminar center in Switzerland: Campus Sursee is basically an institution for the initial and advanced training of building specialists but is also available for company seminars in other sectors. With an entire complex of new buildings, Campus Sursee is now focusing its attention on another area: the new sports arena is due to open in a few months’ time.

Construction of the largest swimming and sports center in Switzerland

In the new sports arena, Switzerland’s largest educational and seminar center will add another superlative to its facilities: the largest swimming and sports center in the country with the infrastructure required for training camps and international competitions; Private visitors will also be welcome. The center will have an Olympic and a semi-Olympic swimming pool as well as a multi-purpose gymnasium, athletics, and gymnastics rooms, outdoor training areas for various sports, a spa, and physiotherapy services tailored to meet all the needs of athletes.

The challenge: high-strength visible concrete with a uniformly bright appearance

Apart from the size of the project, there was also another major challenge. The entire building complex was to be constructed using light-colored visible concrete. White cement was to be used both for the premixed concrete and for the prefabricated components and the color of all the components was to be uniform. The color of concrete is affected by a number of different factors including type of cement, cement content, aggregates, formwork surface, and processing. In the case of this project, there were also three different concrete manufacturers. 

Samples for color matching and detailed optimization

In order to ensure a uniformly matched color and to meet the high material quality requirements, special care was taken over the preparations. After all three concrete manufacturers had produced samples and the colour had been matched, a mock-up, a simulation of the project, was generated. Thanks to this test procedure, it was possible to optimize the various concrete formulations as well as a few design details. In addition, the optimum formwork material for each concrete supplier could be defined in advance.

Extremely strong, robust and attractive with admixtures from Master Builders Solutions

The planners received direct support from the Master Builders Solutions concrete experts in Switzerland. With comprehensive advice in advance of the project and the combination of four Master Builders Solutions concrete admixtures, they ensured the quality of the high-strength concrete with its special color: MasterGlenium ACE 30 ensured strong, flowable concrete, the rheology was optimized using MasterMatrix SCC 2; other products used were the hardening accelerator Master X-Seed 100 and the air-entraining admixture MasterAir 302 for higher frost resistance. The result was a robust, easy-to-process concrete with high early strength, immaculate surfaces, and a rapid production procedure.

The construction work on the complex has now been successfully completed. In mid-August, the last nail was symbolically hammered into the top storey. Over the coming months, internal completion work will be proceeding at full speed and the inauguration is planned for March 2019.

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