The bridges of the Northern Marmara Motorway
A project with great engineering planning as the whole bridge is built by the incremental launch method with continuous changes in the cross-section geometry and longitudinal slope of the bridge
The Northern Marmara Motorway, connects Asia and Europe and is marked by its unique structures and great engineering projects, as well as its tunnels where 4 cars can pass side by side, something never done before. The project in total will include 8 tunnels, 30 viaducts, 143 bridges, 96 subways, 73 overpasses that will cover a total of 430 km of roads.
A project, with a total cost of 927,295.59 USD. In the 5th section of the project, which is between the Port link Road of the Northern Marmara Motorway and Izmit, 2 bridges will be placed, one of them connecting a viaduct into a tunnel in Izmit, and which is the highlited project here presented.
One of the scaffolding solutions required was a structure suspended from the pier cap (abutment head) to supervise the support devices during the movement of the bridge deck. Some of the difficulties in the proposed solutions were height issues, where some of the suspended structures would be 60m off the ground. All things considered, a flexible and high load bearing scaffold system was in demand, and our engineers had no doubt considering Catari US®. Support studies and mooring points were difficult to overcome as the distance between the pier cap and deck would be very small (around 750mm) and no component could exceed this limit. One of the solutions was the use of IPE profiles supported on the pier cap.
The scaffold project required a huge attention to safety, since the suspended structures would be pre-assembled on the ground to then be lifted to the top pillar using a crane. Considering that the road deck would already be placed on top of the structure, the dismantling process could not follow the same process. Therefore, the solution was to leave some openings in the bridge deck and use hydraulic jacks to lower the platforms.