The toll road “Via Puente Industrial” represents one of the major public infrastructure under development in Chile. The toll road will have a total length of 6 km, dual carriage-way and two lanes in each direction. It will link the Municipality of Hualpén to San Pedro de la Paz.

The total investment of the project is about 160 million dollars and includes the construction of the main section “Puente Industrial”, that is the fourth viaduct over the Biobio River, in the Conception region of the country, and it incorporates  various complementary works at intersections at different levels and railway overpass.

The bridge will have a total length of 2.5 km, 2 abutments and XX piers. Due to the high seismicity of the site, the structure will be seismically isolated with Lead Rubber Bearings (LRB) anti-seismic devices, capable to dissipate the earthquake energy thanks to the hysteretic properties of the lead core. For this project Freyssinet was involved since the design phase, offering its competences in proposing a complete solution from the design to the production and finally testing of a total of 784 ISOSISM LRB, of which 14 isolators for the abutments (type ISOSISM LRB-N 800x246.5) and n° 770 for the piers (type ISOSISM LRB-N 650x204).

The high number of devices to produce, together with the very demanding performance and testing requirements, asking to test full scale all the 780 isolators with a maximum variation of 10% on the average performance, represented a real challenge. Freyssinet successfully achieved it, going even beyond the requirement providing an overall variation close to half of the required value, thanks to both strict quality and production processes going in  parallel that allows to control all the steps from characterization of incoming material up to the vulcanization of the full isolator and to the testing of the full mass production.

This paper aims at analysing the performance characteristics of the lead rubber bearings provided for this important project with special focus on the quality control processes that Freyssinet carries on during the full production cycle. This was a mandatory gate to guarantee the performances beyond the requirements of the applicable standard.