An operation to install the railway arch of the Crimean bridge is underway in the Kerch Strait. The largest in Europe: what technical features make the Crimean Bridge the eighth wonder of the world? What is the weight of the arch of the Crimean Bridge
SIMFEROPOL, August 29 – RIA Novosti, Maxim Groznov. The railway arch of the bridge under construction across the Kerch Strait weighing 6 thousand tons is fixed on fairway supports at an altitude of 35 meters above the water level, the Crimean Bridge information center reported.
The operation to install the railway arch span of the bridge across the Kerch Strait began on Sunday morning, and shipping traffic in the strait was suspended for 72 hours. The arched span, 227 meters long and 45 meters high, was transported using floaters to the fairway supports. Lifting of the arch using powerful jacks began late on Monday evening and was successfully completed on Tuesday morning.
“The railway arch of the Crimean Bridge has been lifted onto the fairway supports and securely fixed at the design height of 35 meters from the water. The ship and aeronautical alarm system is already operating on the structure. Final installation on the fairway supports will take another three weeks,” the message says.
“The production of the arch, its assembly on slipways over the course of a year, the manufacture of the floating systems on which it was loaded, the fastening of the arch on powerful fairway supports: all together - this is a unique operation. We gathered the best specialists who were able to do this, and we are very grateful to them for this,” the information center quotes the words of the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Stroygazmontazh LLC Arkady Rotenberg.
© Info center "Crimean Bridge"
© Info center "Crimean Bridge"
The floating supports, with the help of which the arch was towed, returned to the Kerch shore for inspection and re-equipment. After carrying out the necessary procedures, a road arch weighing 5 thousand tons will be transported and installed. As a result, two arched spans will rise above the fairway, under which ships will pass unhindered, the Crimean Bridge information center noted.
The bridge across the Kerch Strait, which will connect Crimea and the Krasnodar Territory, will be the longest in Russia - its length will be 19 kilometers. The start of vehicle traffic on the bridge is scheduled for December 2018.
September 19, 2017.
Bridge builders continue preparations for transportation of the second arched span of the bridge across the Kerch Strait. On the evening of September 18, the structure began moving along the roll-out piers and moved one and a half dozen meters. Today there is a foggy haze over the pier, but the fact that the arch has changed its location can be seen in the online camera installed on Mount Mithridates.
The Crimean Bridge information center shared technical details of preparations for this important event.
The road arched span of the Crimean Bridge was removed from the slipway at the Kerch technological site, where its assembly was carried out throughout the year. Using elements of rods and pushing devices, a structure weighing more than 5 thousand tons is moved horizontally over a distance of almost 140 meters. This is in preparation for a future naval operation, which is scheduled for late September - October, weather conditions permitting.
“Moving” is carried out gradually, during the day and at night, with technological breaks. The arch is moving to the loading site on floating supports, which will subsequently transport it to the fairway supports of the bridge across the Kerch Strait.
The road arch consists of almost 200 large elements (blocks of orthotropic slabs, arched vaults). For assembly, 4.5 km of butt welds of the first category were made, 175 thousand pieces (or 110 tons) of high-strength bolts were tightened. The structure is covered with three layers of anti-corrosion protection, which required more than 46 thousand liters of signal white paint.
“The road arched span is like a stretched bow, where the arch supports the lower part with flexible suspensions,” said Yuri Safonov, chief engineer of the FKU Uprdor “Taman” Rosavtodor. – However, the suspensions are not yet 100% tensioned. They will take on the full load after the arch is installed in the design position on the supports. During future transportation, the arched span will maintain its shape due to special auxiliary structures.”
The span moves along rollout piers on “sleds” - these are metal structures with a polished sheet at the bottom. There are two traction “threads” stretched along each of the two piers, with jacks at the end. Along the path of the “sled” movement, special sliding “cages” are placed, which provide a minimum coefficient of friction.
Once the arch span has been moved to the end of the piers, it will be moved to auxiliary supports for subsequent operations in preparation for loading onto the floating supports.
In parallel, preparations for the offshore operation of the floating supports themselves continue. The road arch is identical to the railway arch span in height, but is 10 meters wider at the tightening (lower part) and in the lock (upper part), and is also 3 meters longer at the time of transportation and approximately 500 tons lighter. Therefore, specialists are carrying out the necessary re-equipment of the floating pore superstructure.
The fairway supports are also being prepared for the rise of the arch. The crossbars have already been installed on the road part of the supports. These are powerful structures, 33 meters long and weighing more than 400 tons, which combine support pillars and evenly distribute the load from the arched span. Builders are preparing work sites where lifting equipment is installed.
Reference
The length of the road arch in its design form is 227 meters. The height at the highest point is 45 meters. Width – 30 meters at the end (lower part), 15 meters at the top point. Total weight is about 5 thousand tons. The width of the roadway, including safety strips, is 23.1 meters.
Structurally - an arch with a rigid tightening. The connection of the lower belt with the arch is provided by flexible pendants. These are solid ropes with a thickness of 6 cm of a closed structure, made of high-strength steel wire. A closed rope consists of a core made of round wire, plus several outer layers of Z-shaped wire. The minimum suspension strength value is 3660 kilonewtons (or 373 tons). There are 22 such pendants on each side of the arch (a total of 44 for the entire arch); their total length is more than 1.2 km (for one pendant - from 4.7 m to 44 m).
The estimated wind speed at the level of the roadway of the arched span can reach 40 m/s. Therefore, to prevent negative aerodynamic phenomena, research was carried out, as a result of which the designers chose a certain form of fairings - special structures along the facade of the road arched span. They will minimize the impact of wind and ensure comfortable operation of the arches.
In addition to fairings, the arch is equipped with inspection passages, cable-supporting structures, drainage trays, lightning protection and grounding, elements of a monitoring system for engineering structures, air navigation and ship alarms, architectural lighting, elements of barrier fencing and lighting supports. These elements are mounted both on the slipway and after installation on the fairway.
The photographs were taken by one of the construction participants. It shows that the arch of the future crossing is already rising above the construction site. The huge metal structure amazes with the size and scale of the work done.
70% of the navigation arches of the Crimean Bridge have already been installed on the Kerch side, said Leonid Ryzhenkin, Deputy General Director for Infrastructure Projects of Stroygazmontazh LLC.
“The navigable arches of the Crimean Bridge are now being assembled on the Kerch side on slipways. More than 7,000 tons of metal structures have already been installed. This is 70% of the total volume,” Ryzhenkin said.
The railway arch weighs almost six thousand tons, and the automobile arch weighs four thousand tons, each length is more than 200 m. These are the largest structures of the Crimean Bridge. Roll-out piers are also being built there, along which the structures will be lowered to the water and moved to pontoons. Work to enlarge the spans is carried out around the clock. More than 500 people are involved in them.
Let us recall that in early April, the head of the Ministry of Transport, Maxim Sokolov, reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the bridge across the Kerch Strait was being built ahead of schedule. The minister noted that more than half of the piles have already been driven and stated that “the equator has already been crossed along the Crimean Bridge.” It was also added that this is a truly important strategic object of Russia, on which efforts were concentrated to the maximum.
The bridge, which will connect Crimea and the Krasnodar region, will pass between the Kerch and Taman peninsulas, across the island of Tuzla. According to the plan, road traffic will be launched in 2018, and rail traffic in 2019. This will not only be the longest bridge in Russia, but also in Europe; in its finished form, its length will be 19 km, and it will “bypass” the currently leading Portuguese road bridge Vasco da Gama, whose length is 17.2 kilometers.
It was barely possible, with great difficulty, to resolve the previous incident - catastrophic heating, compensating for it with additional capacities, urgently transferred from Siberian hydroelectric power stations, when a new disaster appeared...In general, the installation of the Kerch Bridge road arch, announced for October, will not take place.
As it turned out, when ordering metal structures from the British shipyard Vosper Thorny croft Group, or VT Group, one of the few in the world specializing in non-standard large-sized objects, an unlikely but expected mistake occurred.
When specifying the dimensions of the arch, the customer (Russian Ministry of Defense) did not explicitly specify the units of measurement, as a result of which standard British units - yards - were used in production. At the same time, the original specifications assumed the use of a meter.
The error was not noticed until the last moment - when the arch, the parts of which were delivered from Britain to the assembly slipway in Taman by transport aircraft, tried to move it onto transport pontoons after the completion of assembly, it turned out that its length was only 91.44% of the design (207.57 m instead of 227) , in strict accordance with the ratio of yard and meter. An attempt to move was made on September 19.
At the same time, the customer does not have the opportunity to demand correction of the mistake made, or the return of 600 million pounds sterling paid for the work, since all the actions of the contractor were previously agreed upon in a conclusive form.
Now there are several options for the development of events, the most likely of which (in descending order of probability) are:
Refusal of further construction of the road part, with the organization of transportation of cars on railway platforms-car carriers, and the organization of paid parking lots for 20 thousand cars on the constructed part of the road bridge. The author of the proposal is the Australian architect Samuel Hood, who took part in the development of the famous project of the Sydney Opera House.
Installation of a car arch in the form of as is (as is) on the so-called additionally built in the middle of the fairway. a swinging support, in the lower part of which a hinge will be placed, allowing horizontal movement of the upper part. At the same time, the autobridge will operate in the so-called flickering mode, i.e. As traffic accumulates in one direction, the arch moves between the supports, and the transport continues to move; at the same time, in the new position of the arch, it is filled with an oncoming flow, after which the cycle repeats
Inserting a car arch into an already installed railway arch, to the maximum possible length from one of the supports, with the organization of an automatically (or manually) controlled crossing at the insertion point, ensuring real-time separation of road and railway flows
Perhaps, as an ultima ratio, an attempt will be made at a joint ritual of the Buryat Dalai Lama Tubden Tsyrendolgor and the supreme shaman of the Mansi Mir-Altyn-Khum, who have already arrived at the scene of the incident.
Supreme shaman of the Mansi Mir-altyn-khum
In a similar situation, during the construction of one of the Moscow metro stations on the Lilac Line, they managed to increase the diameter of a batch of tubing from 12 m to 14.
However, now a positive outcome seems, although not impossible, but unlikely.
In any case, no matter what decision is made, the impossibility of ensuring the declared capacity (20-40 thousand cars and up to 50 pairs of trains per day), a significant delay in the completion of construction to the right and its (construction) increase in cost by no less than 40.4% from the established estimate (228 billion rubles) are completely obvious to those who understand.
P.S.
In case someone didn’t catch up, then this post is banter on the topic “There is no bridge.”
The author needs to write for Censor.net under a pseudonym. He would have been in the top three cult ukroanalysts long ago. Again, the extra income is sure, and not just pleasure))).
Proof of this is the current operation to install a road arched span, which has no equal in the world - a multi-ton metal structure 227 meters long is brought in from the sea to be installed on fairway supports at a height of 35 meters. This cannot be called anything other than a technical miracle. The idea of building a crossing across the Kerch Strait has existed since time immemorial, probably even when Prince Potemkin annexed Crimea to Russia in 1783. But communication with the peninsula in this direction for a long time was only by ferry and shipping. Military sappers built a ferry crossing here at the end of the Great Patriotic War, after the liberation of Crimea from Nazi troops.
But in 1945, the pontoon bridge was destroyed by the movement of ice that moved from the Azov Sea. The design itself, intended for short river crossings, turned out to be unsuitable for sea conditions. It was decided to dismantle the building completely and design the construction of a new, more reliable structure.
However, neither in 1949 nor in 1991 did the developed and even approved projects for the construction of a bridge in the Kerch Bay ever receive their actual implementation. The complexity of the technical execution of the projects (and there were several of them) and the lack of such large-scale funding also had an impact. We were content with land communications, road and rail, through the territory of the then Ukrainian SSR, present-day Ukraine - there were no problems on its part then.
The topic of building a bridge in the Kerch Strait was returned to in 2003, when Ukraine was already enjoying its “independence” to the fullest and considered Crimea its “native” territory. Due to Russia's intention to build an artificial dam to the island of Tuzla, a serious conflict arose with official Kiev. There were still more than ten long years left before the return of Crimea, and the scandalous situation hushed up on its own. But even then it became clear that the historical identity of the peninsula would sooner or later be restored. Which, in fact, happened as a result of the popular referendum in 2014. And after just three years, Crimea had the opportunity to receive reliable communications with the mainland.
“They couldn’t decide how to build a bridge across the Kerch Strait for quite some time,” says expert, formerly official representative of the Russian railway troops, Alexander Komarov. - Several projects were envisaged where the length mattered, because a kilometer of highway on land and over the sea area have significant differences, including in cost. The following projects were proposed as the main construction options. “Northern” - from Cape Lantern to Maly Kut. The length of the structure would be at least 10 kilometers, while the railway line would have to be pulled for 24 kilometers, and the road line twice as long. The Zhukovsky route could connect Zhukovka and the Chushka spit - there are only 6 kilometers, but the access roads of all types of transport are very long. The “Yenikalsky” project envisaged stretching from Cape Yenikalino to the Chushka Spit, but even here, with a relatively short distance, everything rested on long access roads. The “Tuzla” direction was seen from Cape Ak-Burun to the island itself - also a very long way. But it was he who became decisive in choosing the site for the construction of the bridge. There are a number of circumstances that made it possible to choose this direction. The new bridge here will not interfere with the existing ferry crossing through the ports of Kavkaz and Crimea. Again, there are opportunities for further development, including through areas for placement of construction materials. There are opportunities to further ensure the operation of the new bridge. Figuratively speaking, trackmen also need to be based somewhere, and preferably in close proximity to the road.”
How the Crimean Bridge is being built across the Kerch Strait is already clear, and the installation of the arched car arch is almost live and this can be seen on TV news, including on the Zvezda TV channel. Let's take a brief look, or rather remember, some of the characteristics of this unique design. The total length of the bridge across the Kerch Strait will be 19 kilometers. Its construction began simultaneously from 8 points. The length of the sea sections from Tuzla Spit to Tuzla Island (6.5 kilometers of land there) and from the island to Kerch will be 13 kilometers. About 600 supports and more than 5.5 thousand piles of different sizes are used to build the bridge.
“It is impossible for a non-professional to visually assess the scale of such construction; the picture in TV clips cannot convey the full complexity of the tasks performed by bridge builders,” continues Alexander Komarov. “This is not just a huge amount of work, but also the technical genius of our engineers, the uniqueness of the equipment, including the six-hundred-ton jacks that are now involved in installing the arch of the automobile span. It is no coincidence that the Crimean Bridge is already called the “eighth wonder of the world” and there is no exaggeration here. But if the construction of the Tower of Babel, a failed miracle of architectural thought, led to a misunderstanding of people speaking different languages, which prevented the construction of a “tower to heaven,” then the bridge across the Kerch Strait, on the contrary, becomes a symbol of unity and friendliness between people.”
The Crimean bridge across the Kerch Strait promises to become the longest in Europe. Now the longest bridges in Russia are in St. Petersburg - the Southern Overpass of the Western High-Speed Diameter, which is a two-story bridge across the Sea Canal and a cable-stayed bridge across the Korabelny Fairway (9378 meters), as well as the Northern Overpass (8794 meters).
In the world practice of bridge construction, China holds the lead, where the Danyang-Kunshan Viaduct, a railway bridge that is part of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, is located, 164 kilometers long. The Qingdao Bridge across Jiaozhou Bay was also built there, the length of which is 42.5 kilometers. There are long bridges in the USA, Egypt, and Japan.
With its more “modest” 19 kilometers, the Crimean Bridge amazes not with its length, but with the uniqueness of technical technologies, in which one of the main ones is the construction of arched spans at high altitudes. After all, the Kerch Strait connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov and there is active shipping there, including large-tonnage dry cargo ships and cruise ships, which will easily fit under the new bridge. And it really has no analogues in the world.
