Yunshi Hanjiang Bridge

Yunshi Hanjiang Bridge
郧十汉江特大桥
Yunyang, Hubei, China
295 feet high / 90 meters high
781 foot span / 238 meter span
2014

One of the longest span extradosed bridges in China, the beautiful Yunshi Hanjiang Bridge carries the G59 Expressway across the famous Han River where a lake was formed from a downstream dam.

The towers are 132 and 127 meters tall with a maximum pier height of 82.6 meters. The deck in on a grade of 1.25% and reaches a maximum of 64 meters above a full reservoir or 90 meters above the old mean river level.

Developed in Japan in the 1990s, extra dosed bridges are a cross between a concrete beam bridge and a cable stayed bridge. Unlike a cable stayed bridge where the stays are generally spaced evenly across the entire deck from tower to tower, the center third of an extra dosed bridge is usually devoid of cables as is the immediate area on either side of the main towers where there is always an open “window”. By relying much more on the strength of the thicker, prestressed concrete beam span below the roadway, extra dosed bridges can have much shorter towers with fewer cables. In some ways extra dosed bridges are not suitable for long spans and they have been built primarily as a prettier alternative to the dull look of a pure beam bridge.

Yunshi Hanjiang Bridge satellite image.

Yunshi Hanjiang Bridge location map.