Piling Rig Mats: Where ALIMATS Fits on a Piling Job, and Where It Doesn't

An engineered piling platform is not a mat in any sense that overlaps with a modular aluminium panel. It's a designed layer of imported stone or crushed hardcore, built to a calculated thickness over a geotextile separator and sized to carry the full working and travelling loads of a tracked rig across the entire compound — not just directly beneath the rig but wherever it needs to walk between pile positions. The design has to account for the rig stationary and loaded, the rig moving, and the ground conditions the site investigation reveals, and it's normally sized using guidance published by bodies such as the Federation of Piling Specialists alongside established geotechnical practice.

That makes it a different scope of work altogether, not a bigger version of the same product. Specifying the platform is a civil engineering exercise: ground investigation, a bearing capacity calculation, a compaction specification, and verification testing once it's built. It's designed and installed by a temporary works engineer and a groundworks contractor well before the rig arrives on site, and it stays down for the duration of the piling programme — sometimes doubling later as a working surface for the structure above.

ALIMATS does not replace any part of that, and we would never claim it does. Even at a verified SWL of up to 80 tonnes — independently confirmed with a Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers — that figure describes the load a mat spreads from a wheel, track or outrigger pad onto ground that has already been assessed as fit to build on. It has nothing to do with the bearing capacity design of an aggregate platform across a whole compound, and it was never meant to.

A piling programme generates a lot of vehicle movement that has nothing to do with the rig's own platform. Wagons deliver reinforcement cages and precast or steel casings, concrete and grout trucks make repeat runs to each bore, and telehandlers shuttle materials between the compound and the working area. Much of that traffic crosses ground that was never built to platform standard — perimeter access roads, laydown areas and grass verges pressed into service as a turning circle — and that's precisely the load spread and ground protection role we designed ALIMATS for.

The module range gives us the flexibility a piling job needs: Mini panels at 0.58 x 0.58m up to Extra Long panels at 3480 x 580mm, configurable from 1.34m² to 8.07m² depending on the route or standing area being covered. We can mat a delivery route through to the compound gate, then lift and relay it as the rig walks the grid to the next cluster of pile positions, without the panels ever sitting anywhere near the rig's own footprint.

Where a mobile crane works alongside the rig — a common arrangement for lifting reinforcement cages into the bore or handling heavy pile segments — that's standard mobile-crane-outrigger ground protection, which we cover in detail in our mobile crane outrigger mats guide. The same principle applies: an SWL of up to 80 tonnes comfortably covers cranes up to 150 tonnes, sized for the outrigger pad loads rather than anything specific to the piling.

The same logic covers the wider compound, the cabin standing, welfare units, materials storage and the access roads tying it all together, in the same spirit as the access-route role ALIMATS plays around a tower crane base. None of it touches the rig's own platform. All of it is ground that would otherwise take a beating from weeks of support traffic.

A piling programme can run for weeks across dozens of pile positions, with the rig walking the grid and the support traffic following it. That favours a mat you can pick up and relay quickly without bringing in extra plant, and that's aluminium's main practical advantage over a steel trackway: ALIMATS panels are handleable by two people with no lifting equipment needed, so we can move a route to keep pace with the rig rather than fixing it in place for the whole contract.

It also has to stand up to repeat loading on the same short stretch of ground, because a delivery route on a piling job rarely gets used once — it gets used by the same wagons and telehandlers, day after day, for as long as that cluster of positions takes. Our bending-test guide has the independent figures, but the short version is this: ALIMATS holds its shape under repeated loading where a competing UHMWPE plastic mat progressively deforms.

We inspect, clean and check every mat before it goes back out, which matters on a job where the same panels might be lifted and relaid a dozen times as the rig progresses. Availability by day, week or long-term hire, or by outright purchase, plus 24/7 delivery on our own FORS Bronze fleet with CPCS-trained drivers, means we can flex the mat quantity on site if the programme runs long or compresses.

Given how often the terminology gets blurred, the single most useful question to ask any mat supplier on a piling enquiry is a blunt one: is this for the rig's own working platform, or for the ancillary access around it? If the answer coming back is anything other than a clear "the access around it," stop and check what's actually being proposed, because a modular aluminium mat quoted against a platform-scale bearing requirement is the wrong product sized against the wrong problem.

In practice, most enquiries that reach us are the second kind once they're properly scoped — protecting the compound, the delivery routes and any mobile crane standing near the rig — and that's the job ALIMATS is built for and proven on, including on programmes as demanding as HS2, Hinkley Point C, Heathrow, Gatwick, Grangemouth Refinery and London Bridge. The platform itself stays with the temporary works engineer, exactly where it belongs.