Visit: The Millennium Bridge
For our physics practical, we visited The Millennium Bridge a pedestrian footbridge located at the heart of London that crosses the River Thames. It links the City and St Paul’s Cathedral to the north with the Globe Theatre and Tate Modern on Bankside. Construction of this infrastructure began in the late 1998 by the engineering company Arup and it was launched on the 10 June 2000.
Structure of Bridge:
Structurally, the bridge is a composition of two key metals steel (2 x 1011 Nm-2) and aluminum. These metals are common in bridges due to their properties of high strength and stiffness. Especially, metals like aluminum are chosen as they provide a very low weight at a sufficient strength and stiffness. The bridge is a suspension bridge and is very shallow; in length it spans over 320 metres. The bridge is designed to hold up to 5000 people at a time. The bridge consists of two Y-shaped armatures that support eight cables each of 120mm in diameter that run along the sides of the 4-metre-wide deck. Moreover, across the bridge the fabricated steel box sections clamp onto the cables every 8 metre interval which supports the deck itself. The cables form the primary structure of the bridge along with a very shallow profile. As a result large cable tensions are induced; thus a dead load of 22.5 MN is endured by these cables. The structure limits the cables from rising more than 2.3 meters above the deck giving a sag ratio of 1:63 which is up to 6 times lower than a conventional suspension bridge. Therefore this gives the bridge a uniquely thin profile, which forms a slight arc across the water.
Social and Historical Factors:
The opening of the superstructure marked the historical period of the year millennium as many around the world have crossed the bridge since then. The innovative structure of the bridge