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.
4 comments:
Hey Ken, that was interesting. thanks for the post. Those bridges are a work of art.
That was really cool! But I don't want to stand up there...
Just like I envisioned. Your storytelling skills are perfecto!
It is amazing that humans can be things to last when they want to, but then they can build things that don't last when they want to just to make more money!
Post a Comment