Thursday, June 11, 2009

Osaka Bay Bridges: Konohana Bridge

We are leaving Tokyo for Osaka Bay to look at a self-anchored suspension bridge.
The Konohana Bridge is a suspension bridge with its cable anchored into the bridge superstructure rather than into the ground. Self-anchoring is an advantage when the soil is weak or the bridge is in deep water. The disadvantage is that the superstructure must be designed to handle the very large forces that are transferred from the suspension cable.
There are very few self-anchored suspension structures in the world. The State of California is replacing the seismically vulnerable East Crossing of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge with a new bridge that includes a self-anchored suspension span. South Korea has built one. Another self-anchored suspension bridge is the Konohana Bridge in Osaka, Japan.
Although the Konohana Bridge and the East Bay Crossing are both self-anchored bridges, they are very different. The Bay Bridge has a single tower, unbalanced spans, a wide deck, and two planes of suspension cables. The Konohana Bridge is narrow, it is almost perfectly balanced, it has two towers, but only a single cable. It is like yesterday's Tsurumi Tsubasa Bridge except with a suspension cable.
Creative Commons License
Osaka Bay Bridges: Konohana Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

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