The largest ever 3D printed concrete bridge has just even completed in the Baoshan district of Shanghai, led professor Xu Weiguo of Tsinghua University’s School of Architecture and the Shanghai Wisdom Bay Investment Management Company.
Spanning 26.3 meters and measuring 3.6 metres wide, the designers pulled their inspiration from the ancient Anju Bridge in China – the oldest open-spandrel, stone segmental arch bridge in the world – before printing out a 1:4 scale physical model to carry out a structural failure test.
Once they were happy with the results, a unique machine with state of the art printing technology was used to print out the concrete components over 450 hours (just under 19 days). As well as proving to be a fast and painless method of bridge construction, the method also allowed for the structure to be embedded with a real-time monitoring system, that can constantly check the strains and stresses the bridge is under.
