Cable Stayed Structures and Stay Cable Technology

The world’s most amazing structures pioneered by BBR

The idea of supporting a bridge deck with cables from one or two pylons has been around for a long time. To the author’s knowledge, the concept of cable-stayed bridges can be tracked back to the early 1600s when the Venetian Verantius built a wooden bridge supported with chain stays. In 1784 the carpenter C. J. Löscher designed a cable-stayed bridge with an approximate span length of 32 m and where the entire bridge was made out of wood, including the stays.

In the 19th century, the French engineer Navier studied several bridge systems supported by wrought iron chains. The results of his studies show that suspension bridges should in general be preferred over cable-stayed systems. From today’s point of view, it can be said with certainty that Navier’s final conclusions were wrong. However, at the time Navier was studying these different bridge systems, the knowledge and equipment for acheiving an even distribution of the load between all the cables - which is one of the key issues for cable-stayed bridges - were not available.

German engineers pioneered the design of cable-stayed bridges after World War II. They were challenged to find new, innovative, and inexpensive bridge designs to replace most of the river crossings on the Rhine which were destroyed during the war. Dischinger proposed designs, where the central span was supported by a suspension system and stay cables carried the outer parts. Dischinger’s combined solutions were never adopted for an actual bridge, but his studies had a big influence on the development of the true cable-stayed bridge system. It was not until the 1950s that Dischinger designed the first true cable-stayed bridge. The Strömsund Bridge (Sweden, 1955) had a main span of 183 m and two side spans of 74.7 m. Gimsing [1] attributes the increase in cable-stayed bridge designs to the improved structural analysis tools that were available. The Germans further developed the design of cable-stayed bridges in the following decades and built several of them. The series of bridges across the Rhine River near Duisburg are examples of these pioneering German bridges.

Early Design by Löscher
Europe (1784)

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