This past week I was in Philadelphia for a Fatigue and Fracture Conference sponsored by
Lehigh University. The purpose of the conference was to understand how to make our bridges safe and functional for the next 100+ years. After the conference I visited three customers and helped them with their programming questions using our hardware. I have attached
some pictures below. The Burlington Bridge had me at about 200+ feet above the river and 60+ feet above the traffic going across the bridge. This was the highest I had ever been on a bridge and was slightly unnerving when trucks would cross. I am thankful that Campbell's makes
ruggedized dataloggers that can operate for years at a time unattended and collect bridge monitoring data that is needed to do
renovation/retrofitting work on bridges. I love my job. The other bridge is the Tuscony bridge which is a Bascule Bridge.
Burlington Bridge. The whole bridge section is raised by gears and counter weights.
Gears built in 1930 for controlling the raising and lowering of the bridge section
Mega-Ton Counter weight on 32 steel cables. Picture needs
to be rotated 90 degrees
Tuscony Bridge. It is a
Bascule Bridge with the opening next to arch like a draw-bridge. It is between two brick piles.
For a demonstration of this type of bridge go to this website.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bascule_bridge
Burlington Bridge. The whole bridge section is raised by gears and counter weights.
Gears built in 1930 for controlling the raising and lowering of the bridge section
Mega-Ton Counter weight on 32 steel cables. Picture needs to be rotated 90 degrees
Tuscony Bridge. It is a Bascule Bridge with the opening next to arch like a draw-bridge. It is between two brick piles.
