Posted on 01/03/2017 7:22:38 AM PST by ganeemead
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Engineering Breakthroughs as China Opens World’s Highest Bridge Dec. 30, 2016 (EIRNS)—A towering bridge hanging 565 meters above a gorge in southwest China opened to traffic yesterday, making it the world’s highest bridge. It was built using engineering technology unique to China’s bridge-building thus far. The Beipanjiang Bridge spans 1.34 kilometers between the city of Xuanwei in Yunnan Province and Shuicheng County in Guizhou Province. It cost more than 1 billion yuan ($140 million) and took only three years to build, according to China Global Television Network (CGTN, formerly CCTV).
Crossing a river valley at 1,800 feet or so, the Beipanjiang Bridge presented new engineering challenges, like those which made Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Corners” and other great projects so challenging to construction and engineering companies, and produced such rapid gains in technological productivity during the New Deal.
Some $15 million of the $140 million total project cost was its “engineering research fund.” “Many institutes, including Jiaotong University, Guizhou Highway engineering group, and the Guizhou office of transportation joined together to conduct research and development,” project developers told CCTV. “We developed a new kind of technology called cantilever erection by longitudinal launching, and this significantly shortened construction time.”
Construction was affected by “a wind field,” requiring a high degree of precision and ruling out the use of cranes to install sections onto the bridge. A 300-foot-long, 580-ton mobile bridge-erecting machine called the SLJ900/32, designed by Shijiazhuang Tiedao University in Shijiazhuang, built the bridge surface in a way used only once before. The machine travels to the edge of the bridge, and reaches out with a temporary track, to towers or cable points yet to be connected to the bridge surface. Once the track is stable, the machine pulls itself out, towing the new permanent bridge segment, and lowers it into place for the construction crew to build the road on.
Showing that not only high-speed rail compresses time and space in transportation, the four-lane bridge will cut the journey time between Xuanwei and Shuicheng from more than four hours to about an hour.
...let’s see what happens with an earthquake
Its only as strong as its fasteners and for some weird reason China reguses to use quality steel in its fastener exports, or maybe they do but send us the cheap crap. Advertised Grade 8 but barely gets a grade 5 in tests.
Impressive looking. Thanks for posting.
My late wife would nearly have a panic attack crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge...I’m sure she’d have gone into cardiac arrest going over that thing!
The height doesn’t bother me as much as ‘Chinese engineering technology’.
I’d like to bungee or BASE jump off of that!
Cool!
No thanks.
Check out today’s WFT Thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3510248/posts
Puts a different spin on Chinese Engineering! :-(
Until I was around 7 I was terrified of crossing bridges. I guess I just grew out of it.
Galloping Chingling?
A windy gorge combined with the vibration of traffic and high quality Chinese steel. What could go wrong?
How long before someone base jumps it?
The line starts at post #7.
I think the high level of terrace farming is what is really interesting. What must the pressures be for food in that country to risk terraces that high on mountains?
Give the Chinese some credit; at least they are building public engineering works. Our public works are old, and we are not building new projects. For example, the longest vehicular underwater tunnel in this country is over 60 years old (Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in NYC.) At one point it was the longest in the world. China, Japan, and Europe have long surpassed this record.
I don’t see an arch in the deck.
Some flex is needed in a span like this one.
I noticed the extreme terracing also.
This, in a country where 60 million were starved to death by their own government.
I’d be growing stuff on the side of a mountain too!
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