Cable-stayed bridge

Cable-stayed bridge

The Russky Bridge's central span measures 1104 meters, the world's longest among cable-stayed bridges.
Ancestor Suspension bridge
Related None
Descendant Side-spar cable-stayed bridge, Self-anchored suspension bridge, cantilever spar cable-stayed bridge
Carries Pedestrians, bicycles, automobiles, trucks, light rail
Span range Medium to Long
Material Steel rope, post-tensioned concrete box girders, steel or concrete pylons
Movable No.
Design effort medium
Falsework required Normally none

A cable-stayed bridge has one or more towers (or pylons), from which cables support the bridge deck.

There are four major classes of cable-stayed bridges: harp, mono, star and fan.

In the harp or parallel design, the cables are nearly parallel so that the height of their attachment to the tower is proportional to the distance from the tower to their mounting on the deck.

In the fan design, the cables all connect to or pass over the top of the towers. The fan design is structurally superior with minimum moment applied to the towers but for practical reasons the modified fan is preferred especially where many cables are necessary. In the modified fan arrangement the cables terminate near to the top of the tower but are spaced from each other sufficiently to allow better termination, improved environmental protection, and good access to individual cables for maintenance.

The cable-stayed bridge is optimal for spans longer than cantilever bridges, and shorter than suspension bridges. This is the range where cantilever bridges would rapidly grow heavier if the span were lengthened, and suspension bridge cabling would not be more economical if the span were shortened.

History

Cable-stayed bridge by the Renaissance polymath Fausto Veranzio, from 1595/1616

Cable-stayed bridges date back to 1595, where designs were found in Machinae Novae, a book by Croatian inventor Fausto Veranzio. Many early suspension bridges were cable-stayed construction, including the 1817 footbridge Dryburgh Abbey Bridge, James Dredge's patented Victoria Bridge, Bath (1836), and the later Albert Bridge (1872) and Brooklyn Bridge (1883). Their designers found that the combination of technologies created a stiffer bridge. John A. Roebling took particular advantage of this to limit deformations due to railway loads in the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge.

The earliest known surviving example of a true cable-stayed bridge in the United States is E.E. Runyon's largely intact steel or iron bridge with wooden stringers and decking in Bluff Dale, Texas (1890), or his weeks-earlier but ruined Barton Creek Bridge between Huckabay, Texas and Gordon, Texas (1889 or 1890).[1][2] In the twentieth century, early examples of cable-stayed bridges included A. Gisclard's unusual Cassagnes bridge (1899),[3] in which the horizontal part of the cable forces is balanced by a separate horizontal tie cable, preventing significant compression in the deck, and G. Leinekugel le Coq's bridge[4] at Lézardrieux in Brittany (1924). Eduardo Torroja designed a cable-stayed aqueduct[5] at Tempul in 1926.[6] Albert Caquot's 1952 concrete-decked cable-stayed bridge[7] over the Donzère-Mondragon canal at Pierrelatte is one of the first of the modern type, but had little influence on later development.[6] The steel-decked Strömsund Bridge designed by Franz Dischinger (1955) is therefore more often cited as the first modern cable-stayed bridge.

Other key pioneers included Fabrizio de Miranda, Riccardo Morandi and Fritz Leonhardt. Early bridges from this period used very few stay cables, as in the Theodor Heuss Bridge (1958). However, this involves substantial erection costs, and more modern structures tend to use many more cables to ensure greater economy.

Comparison with suspension bridge

Cable-stayed bridges may appear to be similar to suspension bridges, but in fact they are quite different in principle and in their construction.

In suspension bridges, large main cables (normally 2) hang between the towers (normally 2), and are anchored at each end to the ground. This can be difficult to implement when ground conditions are poor. The main cables, which are free to move on bearings in the towers, bear the load of the bridge deck. Before the deck is installed, the cables are under tension from their own weight. Along the main cables smaller cables or rods connect to the bridge deck, which is lifted in sections. As this is done, the tension in the cables increases, as it does with the live load of traffic crossing the bridge. The tension on the main cables is transferred to the ground at the anchorages and by downwards tug on the towers.

In the cable-stayed bridge, the towers are the primary load-bearing structures which transmit the bridge loads to the ground. A cantilever approach is often used to support the bridge deck near the towers, but lengths further from them are supported by cables running directly to the towers. This has the disadvantage, compared to the suspension bridge, that the cables pull to the sides as opposed to directly up, requiring the bridge deck to be stronger to resist the resulting horizontal compression loads; but has the advantage of not requiring firm anchorages to resist the horizontal pull of the main cables of the suspension bridge. By design all static horizontal forces of the cable-stayed bridge are balanced so that the supporting towers do not tend to tilt or slide, needing only to resist horizontal forces from the live loads.

Key advantages of the cable-stayed form are as follows:

Variations

Side-spar cable-stayed bridge

Puente de la Unidad, joining San Pedro Garza García and Monterrey, a Cantilever spar cable-stayed bridge
Anzac Bridge, Sydney

A side-spar cable-stayed bridge uses a central tower supported on only one side. This design allows the construction of a curved bridge.

Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, Dartford, England
Envigado bridge a cable-stayed bridge in Envigado (Colombia)

Cantilever-spar cable-stayed bridge

Far more radical in its structure, the Puente del Alamillo (1992) uses a single cantilever spar on one side of the span, with cables on one side only to support the bridge deck. Unlike other cable-stayed types, this bridge exerts considerable overturning force upon its foundation and the spar must resist the bending caused by the cables, as the cable forces are not balanced by opposing cables. The spar of this particular bridge forms the gnomon of a large garden sundial. Related bridges by the architect Santiago Calatrava include the Puente de la Mujer (2001), Sundial Bridge (2004) and Chords Bridge (2008).

Multiple-span cable-stayed bridge

Cable-stayed bridges with more than three spans involve significantly more challenging designs than do 2-span or 3-span structures.

In a 2-span or 3-span cable-stayed bridge, the loads from the main spans are normally anchored back near the end abutments by stays in the end spans. For more spans, this is not the case and the bridge structure is less stiff overall. This can create difficulties in both the design of the deck and the pylons. Examples of multiple-span structures in which this is the case include Ting Kau Bridge, where additional 'cross-bracing' stays are used to stabilise the pylons; Millau Viaduct and Mezcala Bridge, where twin-legged towers are used; and General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge, where very stiff multi-legged frame towers were adopted. A similar situation with a suspension bridge is found at both the Great Seto Bridge and San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge where additional anchorage piers are required after every set of three suspension spans - this solution can also be adapted for cable-stayed bridges.[8]

Extradosed bridge

The extradosed bridge is a cable-stayed bridge but with a more substantial bridge deck that, being stiffer and stronger, allows the cables to be omitted close to the tower and for the towers to be lower in proportion to the span. The first extradosed bridges were the Ganter Bridge and Sunniberg Bridge in Switzerland. A new extradosed bridge is also being planned to cross the St. Croix River between Bayport, Minnesota and Houlton, Wisconsin in the Twin Cities.

Cable-stayed cradle-system bridge

A cradle system carries the strands within the stays from bridge deck to bridge deck, as a continuous element, eliminating anchorages in the pylons. Each epoxy-coated steel strand is carried inside the cradle in a one-inch (2.54 cm) steel tube. Each strand acts independently, allowing for removal, inspection and replacement of individual strands. The first two such bridges are the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, completed in 2006, and the Veterans' Glass City Skyway, completed in 2007.[9]

Related bridge types

Self anchored suspension bridge

A self-anchored suspension bridge has some similarity in principle to the cable-stayed type in that tension forces that prevent the deck from dropping are converted into compression forces vertically in the tower and horizontally along the deck structure. It is also related to the suspension bridge in having arcuate main cables with suspender cables, although the self-anchored type lacks the heavy cable anchorages of the ordinary suspension bridge. Unlike either a cable stayed bridge or a suspension bridge, the self-anchored suspension bridge must be supported by falsework during construction and so it is more expensive to construct.

Notable cable-stayed bridges

See also: List of longest cable-stayed bridge spans and Category:Cable-stayed bridges

Erasmus Bridge, Erasmusbrug, in Rotterdam, Netherlands
A view of the Golden Horn Metro Bridge, with the Galata Tower at the left end of the frame, Istanbul, Turkey
Most SNP (Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising) - the world's longest cable-stayed bridge to have one pylon and one cable-stayed plane (Bratislava, Slovakia, 1967-1972).

It houses a flying-saucer restaurant at the top of pylon 85 metres tall.

Octavio Frias de Oliveira bridge, in São Paulo, Brazil. It is the only bridge in the world that has two curved tracks supported by a single concrete mast.

References

Further reading

External links

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