Bridges
- Publication no: ABC-DES025-11
- Published: 31 October 2011
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The new Iron Cove Bridge is part of the recently completed Inner West Busway Project along Victoria Rd in Sydney, which was delivered as an alliance contract by the Bridge to Bay Alliance. The alliance team partners are the RTA, Baulderstone, Hyder Consulting and Manidis Roberts and sub alliance partners Freyssinet.
The bridge is a 480m long hybrid structure comprising eight spans of single box girder superstructure, with three approach spans of super-t girders tying into the existing Victoria Rd approaches. The construction methods include incremental launch for the main spans of the new Iron Cove Bridge.
This paper outlines the progression from concept to completion for the design and construction solution reached by the team to enable the New Iron Cove Bridge to be incrementally launched in a constrained location and describes the design features for the superstructure and substructure. In particular the paper addresses the unusual launching procedure that had the casting bed located in front of the new abutment, the launch pier in front of the casting bed and the detailing required to control the deflections and rotations during launch for the critical locations of the segment construction joints. Incorporated in the launching sequence was the launch nose that was erected and launched with the first segment from the rear of the launching bed. The launch process was a critical factor in the project program and a cycle time of 6 days was achieved for segment launch through the use of a high early strength concrete mix, concrete maturity testing and prefabrication of reinforcement in a jig adjacent the casting bed.
The result of the techniques adopted for the Iron Cove Bridge Design and Construction was that the bridge was completed to a tight program that saw the project opening ahead of schedule.