The Rantburg School of Engineering is now open, EFL:
The stunningly beautiful Millau Viaduct, opened by President Jacques Chirac yesterday, is a bridge to the future. Built in only three years, using construction and design techniques and materials which did not exist a decade ago, it is the highest and the heaviest bridge ever built. Seen from a distance, and even from the foot of one of its colossal split, curving piers, it has a deceptive fragility. | It's a beautiful bridge, the BASE jumpers must be drooling at the thought. |
The bridge, in the southern Massif Central, designed by the British architect Lord Foster, and constructed by French engineers, has pioneered techniques which will open the way to even bigger structures. The first may be a span across the straits of Messina from Calabria in southern Italy to Sicily. Lord Foster and French engineers believe the Millau Viaduct - 2.4 km long (1.5 miles) and 270m (885 ft) above the river Tarn at its highest point, and several metres taller than the Eiffel Tower - will mark the beginning of a new era in mankind's 2,000-year-old love affair with bridge building. In the Millau Viaduct, computer-design methods, global satellite positioning and high-tech steels and concretes have come together with an aesthetic overall plan conceived by an architect, not an engineer. The result is a bridge of enormous beauty, built in record time, for a relatively cheap €400m (£275m), entirely financed by private investment, which will be refunded by tolls over 75 years. | "Higher, heavier, faster, cheap, pioneering techniques", I think I'll avoid getting anywhere near this bridge. |
The gently curving deck of the bridge - on which the four-lane road rests - has been constructed from a new high grade of steel, rather than the more usual concrete. The French construction company Eiffage devised a method for pre-constructing the 32m-wide road-deck in 2,000 pieces at its factory in Alsace. They were welded together on the hills on either side of the valley and then shoved out like giant planks over the abyss, 60cms at a time. Satellite positioning technology was used to ensure the curving road connected correctly. | Let's hope they did a better job than they did on the Paris airport. |
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