Greece's new high‐speed railway line: Detailed design and construction engineering of bridge SG26

Abstract

AbstractThe paper presents the several aspects of the detailed design and the construction engineering procedure of the most important Railway Bridge of the New Double High‐Speed Railway Line connecting Athens and Thessaloniki, the two biggest cities in Greece. The total length of the bridge is 404.8m consisting of three simply supported tied arches with a width of 18.03m. The two piers, 45.5m height each, are supported on rigid caisson foundations. The bridge has been constructed using the incremental launching method due to the deep valley below. The special characteristic of the bridge is that it crosses an active fault zone, associated with large seismic events (e.g. 1954 magnitude 6.8). Seismic devices (Friction Pendulum System and Fluid Viscous Damper) are installed between the deck and the substructure in order to absorb the anticipated seismic energy and consequently reduce deck displacement and force transmission to the structural elements. I. MAVRAKIS & PARTNERS S.A. carried out the detailed design and construction engineering, including the design of the temporary steel piers, the incremental launching procedure, the precamber design of the arches, the prestressing sequence of the hangers, the seismic isolation design and the shop drawings of the whole structure.