I've always been fascinated by extreme engineering and infrastructure. Here's a few projects that I either know about from real life, or have learned about via the wonders of Wikipedia:
The Brooklyn Bridge may be our fair borough's most famous bridge, but yesterday I took a walk around Bay Ridge and was able to get a close-up view of Brooklyn's other famous suspension bridge:
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the world's longest suspension bridge when completed in 1964, and still the longest one in the United States.
While the Verrazano transports cars across water, here's a structure that transports boats across land:
Its my understanding the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge has the longest center span but the Gloden Gate and Mackinac have longer main cable spans measured between achorages. It is a nice, sleek bridge regardless. I love seeing it when flying into New york.
I've never seen the Macinac Bridge in person, but it looks like an incredible structure. Although the Verrazano has a longer center span, the Mac is a longer bridge between anchorages.
The Mac -- being designed soon after the dramatic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge -- is considerably over-engineered to withstand wind loads.
According to the Wikipedia article, David Steinman was a consultant who submitted a proposal on the Tacoma Narrows bridge, but was dismissed early in the project for apparently not being sufficiently aggressive in fundraising for the project.
The Tacoma Narrows bridge was designed by Leon Moisseiff, who also had roles in the designs of the Manhattan Bridge here in NYC, and the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. (Two spans, incidentally, that have each been a part of my daily commute at various times in my life.)
The Manhattan Bridge has had its own structural issues, due mainly to the subway tracks being placed along the outside of the span. The heavy subway trains crossing the bridge cause it to tilt and stretch asymmetrically, and resulted in a years-long project to repair and strengthen the bridge and several long-term closures of the subway tracks.
(The Ben Franklin Bridge has the PATCO tracks along the outer edges, but PATCO trains are lighter and don't run as frequently as NYC subway trains. I'm unaware of the Ben Franklin Bridge requiring the type of extensive structural rehabilitation that the Manhattan Bridge has required.)
The Tacoma Narrows bridge has fascinated me since I saw the movie of it in my first structures class in 1986! That wiki entry has a video with footage I had never seen before - the main cable sliding back and forth in its anchorage, for example. I get giddy over that stuff, my husband says I just love "disaster porn"!
You just have to wonder: wasn't there *any* evidence that the winds could be a problem while they were building the bridge? I guess if the span had to be complete to make the effect work there wouldn't have been. Awesome, scary, but awesome.
By the way, that's a pretty incredible photo of the Tokyo sewer. Apparently it's part of a massive water storage and evacuation system, not unlike Chicago's Deep Tunnel Project. While Chicago's system is designed to store excess water from severe storms, Tokyo's system is designed to store water in the event of a tsunami.
The photo reminds me of this:
If inhabited, it would be almost like the underground city from Metropolis. Interesting stuff.
This is just for fun, I'll go into a some detail about the collapse. The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse basically ushered in a whole new era of structural engineer. As you can see in the famous video, the collapse was not simply a straightforward lateral wind design failure. The bridge wasn't simply blown over. What happened was a much more complicated failure involving harmonic fluttering. The actual wind load at the time of failure was not especially high, however it caused the bridge to go into torsional harmonic motion, which resulted in the oscillations becoming amplified instead of dampened. So even though an initial gust of wind at this velocity would not cause any damage to the bridge, sustained flows resulted in the bridge going into the rocking motion shown in the video, which caused the mass of the bridge to work against itself and ultimately, upon reaching a critical point, resulted in the collapse. This type of failure is something that many engineers to this day, particularly those who do not work on this type of project, do not understand or do not understand fully.
As a result of this failure, engineers have paid additional attention to flutter and resonance, especially in bridge and high rise design.
Another interesting thing to keep in mind is that the properties of flow are not scale homogeneous, which is to say that the way a tiny scale model reacts to a wind or air current will not be consistent with the manner in which the full scale bridge reacts. Engineers have come of with methods of adjusting for this effect, but it is not a straight forward 1x2=2 type operation.
On more recent projects, great amounts of time have been devoted to understanding the oscillations of cables, such as the main cables that support the deck structure in a suspension bridge. This is especially complicated, because during certain types of storm conditions, the profile of the cable has been found to be altered dramatically, thus resulting in new, different oscillation patterns from those exhibited prior to the storm. One major cause for this is during a freezing rain storm the cables will tend to collect ice. To visualize this, imagine a cable floating in the air being rained on, the rain runs down the cable to the low point of the cables droop and collects together with other droplets and freezes, thus changing the cables normal round section into something of an upside down tear drop shape. This freezing ice effect on the bridge deck will be minimal due to the deck's size relative to the ice deposits, but on cables, the effect can completely alter the fundamental period of the cable in wind oscillations, and basically just throw a whole 'nother damn wrench into the mess!
with the colossus @ rhodes, the metal workers scaled directly from the maquette, and the walls were to thin, and thus it collapsed? or was that a daydream?
New software can really help, especially with numerical methods, but of course it really depends on the user. In the wrong hands, the software can just be a much quicker way to get to an incorrect answer, as they say "garbage in, garbage out".
This is kind of a fun one, this is the annual migration of the sail boats from Lake Michigan down the Chicago river as winter approaches. The sailboats like to travel down to the warm waters of St. Louis were they will seek mates with the brightest sails and sharpest dagger boards to produce young skiffs for the following spring.
Nov 28, 08 12:31 pm ·
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The Extreme Engineering Thread
I've always been fascinated by extreme engineering and infrastructure. Here's a few projects that I either know about from real life, or have learned about via the wonders of Wikipedia:
The Brooklyn Bridge may be our fair borough's most famous bridge, but yesterday I took a walk around Bay Ridge and was able to get a close-up view of Brooklyn's other famous suspension bridge:
The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the world's longest suspension bridge when completed in 1964, and still the longest one in the United States.
While the Verrazano transports cars across water, here's a structure that transports boats across land:
Falkirk Wheel, Scotland.
Here's a couple from the "World's Most Dangerous Roads" category:
Yungas Road, Bolivia
Guoliang Tunnel, China
What are some of your favorite examples of extreme engineering?
Oops, just noticed I'm not the first one to coin this thread title.... Sorry, WonderK.
Its my understanding the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge has the longest center span but the Gloden Gate and Mackinac have longer main cable spans measured between achorages. It is a nice, sleek bridge regardless. I love seeing it when flying into New york.
The firth of forth rail bridge in Scotland is a classic:
Early proof of concept work:
Langkawi Sky Bridge in Malaysia:
The DUluth Aerial Lift Bridge in Minnesota:
whoops here is the Duluth bridge:
I've always loved the Firth of Forth Bridge, but I had never seen that photo demonstrating the concept. Interesting stuff.
The Quebec Bridge over the St. Lawrence River has a similar structural design, but with a much more troubled history.
The 918 meter Magdeburg Water Bridge in Germany:
thats cool^^
Great thread...
CN Tower
more in that same theme
Ostankino Tower - Moscow, Russia
Oriental Pearl Tower - Shanghai, China
Space Needle - Seattle
And this is what started it all - a water tower in Russia
The first hyperboloid structure - by Vladimir Shukhov
Greenville Liberty Bridge:
[img[http://de.structurae.de/files/photos/2347/artisphere_2005_022.jpg width=420 [/img]
Killesburg Tower in Stuttgart, Germany:
christian menn, ganter bridge
norman foster, millau viaduct
robert maillart, Töss Footbridge
schwandbach bridge
and it's centering (is that the correct term?)
and i've always been enamored w/ the new river gorge bridge, though it might not qualify as extreme...
Nice Mailart bridges, he has so many good ones.
yeah, the swiss are pretty prolific engineers as well (menn, jurg conzett, heinz isler)
isler
conzett
The ultimate piece of extreme engineering:
LHC @ Cern
Canals under Tokyo, I believe:
From the image gallery right here on archinect.
I looked in the image gallery and couldn't find the image of the Monticello Dam Spillway, as seen here on a blog.
Both pretty awesome solutions to too much water.
you guys need to learn how to link your images. man that is annoying. my fav structural engineer is definitely christian menn.
i am a big fan of the oft-overlooked mackinac bridge myself
for some reason they all show up now, huh
I've never seen the Macinac Bridge in person, but it looks like an incredible structure. Although the Verrazano has a longer center span, the Mac is a longer bridge between anchorages.
The Mac -- being designed soon after the dramatic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge -- is considerably over-engineered to withstand wind loads.
i believe they were also built by the same engineer
According to the Wikipedia article, David Steinman was a consultant who submitted a proposal on the Tacoma Narrows bridge, but was dismissed early in the project for apparently not being sufficiently aggressive in fundraising for the project.
The Tacoma Narrows bridge was designed by Leon Moisseiff, who also had roles in the designs of the Manhattan Bridge here in NYC, and the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. (Two spans, incidentally, that have each been a part of my daily commute at various times in my life.)
The Manhattan Bridge has had its own structural issues, due mainly to the subway tracks being placed along the outside of the span. The heavy subway trains crossing the bridge cause it to tilt and stretch asymmetrically, and resulted in a years-long project to repair and strengthen the bridge and several long-term closures of the subway tracks.
(The Ben Franklin Bridge has the PATCO tracks along the outer edges, but PATCO trains are lighter and don't run as frequently as NYC subway trains. I'm unaware of the Ben Franklin Bridge requiring the type of extensive structural rehabilitation that the Manhattan Bridge has required.)
The Tacoma Narrows bridge has fascinated me since I saw the movie of it in my first structures class in 1986! That wiki entry has a video with footage I had never seen before - the main cable sliding back and forth in its anchorage, for example. I get giddy over that stuff, my husband says I just love "disaster porn"!
You just have to wonder: wasn't there *any* evidence that the winds could be a problem while they were building the bridge? I guess if the span had to be complete to make the effect work there wouldn't have been. Awesome, scary, but awesome.
By the way, that's a pretty incredible photo of the Tokyo sewer. Apparently it's part of a massive water storage and evacuation system, not unlike Chicago's Deep Tunnel Project. While Chicago's system is designed to store excess water from severe storms, Tokyo's system is designed to store water in the event of a tsunami.
The photo reminds me of this:
If inhabited, it would be almost like the underground city from Metropolis. Interesting stuff.
Liberty Bell,
This is just for fun, I'll go into a some detail about the collapse. The Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse basically ushered in a whole new era of structural engineer. As you can see in the famous video, the collapse was not simply a straightforward lateral wind design failure. The bridge wasn't simply blown over. What happened was a much more complicated failure involving harmonic fluttering. The actual wind load at the time of failure was not especially high, however it caused the bridge to go into torsional harmonic motion, which resulted in the oscillations becoming amplified instead of dampened. So even though an initial gust of wind at this velocity would not cause any damage to the bridge, sustained flows resulted in the bridge going into the rocking motion shown in the video, which caused the mass of the bridge to work against itself and ultimately, upon reaching a critical point, resulted in the collapse. This type of failure is something that many engineers to this day, particularly those who do not work on this type of project, do not understand or do not understand fully.
As a result of this failure, engineers have paid additional attention to flutter and resonance, especially in bridge and high rise design.
Another interesting thing to keep in mind is that the properties of flow are not scale homogeneous, which is to say that the way a tiny scale model reacts to a wind or air current will not be consistent with the manner in which the full scale bridge reacts. Engineers have come of with methods of adjusting for this effect, but it is not a straight forward 1x2=2 type operation.
On more recent projects, great amounts of time have been devoted to understanding the oscillations of cables, such as the main cables that support the deck structure in a suspension bridge. This is especially complicated, because during certain types of storm conditions, the profile of the cable has been found to be altered dramatically, thus resulting in new, different oscillation patterns from those exhibited prior to the storm. One major cause for this is during a freezing rain storm the cables will tend to collect ice. To visualize this, imagine a cable floating in the air being rained on, the rain runs down the cable to the low point of the cables droop and collects together with other droplets and freezes, thus changing the cables normal round section into something of an upside down tear drop shape. This freezing ice effect on the bridge deck will be minimal due to the deck's size relative to the ice deposits, but on cables, the effect can completely alter the fundamental period of the cable in wind oscillations, and basically just throw a whole 'nother damn wrench into the mess!
isn't that a concept that vitruvius discusses?
with the colossus @ rhodes, the metal workers scaled directly from the maquette, and the walls were to thin, and thus it collapsed? or was that a daydream?
Thanks, synergy. I guess computer modeling has drastically increased our ability to predict combined effects like changing cross section + variable wind speeds, right?
LiG, what is that picture, is that from Chicago?
has a lot of extreme engineering feats photographed as well as a lot of other great shots.
The pic is from the mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings. :)
New software can really help, especially with numerical methods, but of course it really depends on the user. In the wrong hands, the software can just be a much quicker way to get to an incorrect answer, as they say "garbage in, garbage out".
Rio Antirio Bridge - Greece
I got to cross this one at night when it was all lit up - very cool.
From elseplace to small pieces barely joined to Deputydog to this.
And back to here.
holy slenderness ratio, batman!
<img src=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Saltashrab.jpg width=418>
oh rats..
yeah anyway...brunel in plymouth is pretty great imo
ijp/akt in singapore
twice rats
ok learned to link pics, sorry for the trial and error!
This is kind of a fun one, this is the annual migration of the sail boats from Lake Michigan down the Chicago river as winter approaches. The sailboats like to travel down to the warm waters of St. Louis were they will seek mates with the brightest sails and sharpest dagger boards to produce young skiffs for the following spring.
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