ESWP: International Bridge Conference®: Technical Program

Long Span Bridges

Tuesday, June 3, 2008
1:30 - 5:00 PM

Chair: Herbert M. Mandel, PE, GAI Consultants, Inc., Homestead, PA

IBC 08-44 - Colorado's Longest Span Crosses 28 Rail Lines
Dean Sandoval, Karen Rowe, Colorado Department of Transportation, Pueblo, CO; Steve Fultz, PE, Figg, Denver, CO

The $27 million Fourth Street Bridge passes through Pueblo and provides clear spans over the Union Pacific Railroad (23 rails), Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad (5 rails) and the Arkansas River. The 1137 long twin, cast-in-place post-tensioned segmental box girders are being built from above in balanced cantilever with form travelers.

IBC 08-45 - Design of Long Span Bridges to Resist Progressive Collapse
Theodore Zoli, HNTB Corporation, New York, NY

Long span bridges have not been designed to resist progressive collapse explicitly; many long span bridge forms, due to reasons of structural efficiency, are intrinsically non-redundant, i.e. they incorporate elements whose localized failure would precipitate collapse. There are also long span bridge forms that are susceptible to progressive collapse due to the loss of a series of adjacent members as a result of a single loading event. In either case, this class of structures may be termed to have single point vulnerability. Herein, aspects of long span bridge design as they relate to single point vulnerability and progressive collapse are discussed together with some suggestions for potential improvements in design strategies.

IBC 08-46 - Experience from the Global Analysis of Sutong and Stonecutter's bridge
Dorian Janjic, TDV GmbH Graz / Bentley systems, Incorporated, Graz, Styria, Austria

The challenges in design for long-span bridges - either stay cable or suspension bridges with high pylons and slender deck section - are related to optimising the stressing sequence of the cables, geometrically non-linear behaviour of the structure, simulation of erection procedure, and to dynamic problems such as wind-induced vibrations. The Stonecutter's Bridge in Hong Kong is the first designed stayed cable bridge to span more than 1000m (1018m, currently under the construction) and the Sutong Bridge in China (1088m, closed in summer 2007) is the first build stayed cable bridge breaking this limit. For both bridges the RM software package has been used for global analysis, by consultants Ove-Arup (Hong Kong) and HPDI (Beijing).

IBC 08-47 - Design of Florida Avenue Bridge over the Inner Harbor Canal
Eric Nelson, Dan Davis, DMJM Harris, Glen Allen, VA

The Florida Avenue Bridge project in New Orleans, Louisiana includes a five-span high-level bridge over the Inner Harbor Canal with a 470-foot center span. Paper will discuss design aspects of both the cast-in-place segmental concrete box girder and steel plate girder alternates for the main span unit.

IBC 08-48 - Replacement of the William R. Bennett Floating Bridge
Darryl Matson, Eduardo Pradilla, Karsten Veng, Buckland & Taylor Ltd., North Vancouver, BC, Canada

The William R Bennett Bridge, a floating bridge across the Okanagan Lake in Canada, will replace the existing aging Okanagan Lake Bridge. The unique nature of this structure presented numerous challenges that were resolved with innovative thinking and close coordination between the design and construction teams.

IBC 08-49 - The Missouri River Pedestrian Bridge, Omaha, NE, USA - State of the Art Cable-Stayed Pedestrian Bridge
Christian Brown, HNTB, Omaha, NE; Hans Hutton, HNTB, Kansas City, MO; Ted Zoli, HNTB, New York, NY

The new Missouri River Pedestrian Bridge is destined to become a landmark for the surrounding community. The design concept is monumental in scale and daring in concept. The main portion of the bridge spans the Missouri River and consists of a one-of-a-kind horizontally curved cable-stayed structure including a 506-foot main span and two 253-foot back spans. The superstructure is supported by single pylons near each bank that rise 200-feet above the water surface. Two planes of cables suspend the superstructure from the pylons. Due to the extreme flexibility of this bridge, many innovative solutions needed to be employed to address both wind and pedestrian induced vibrations.

IBC 08-50 - Aerodynamic Design of Baling River Bridge
Liu Gao, China Highway Planning and Design Institute (HPDI) Consultants, Inc., Beijing, P.R. China

Baling River Bridge is designed as an expressway link across the Baling River gorge in Guizhou Province, forming a part of National Highway from Shanghai to Ruili, which is one of "the Five Longitudinal, Seven Transverse" national trunk highways in "National Highway Development Plan" (1999~2020) promulgated by the Ministry of Communications of China. The aerodynamic design of Baling River Bridge was based on comprehensive wind engineering studies involving the conduct of wind tunnel tests using terrain field model covering the terrain within 9 km radius of the bridge, rigid section models for the bridge.

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