Wing-type Bridge - 2012

The Wing-type Bridge is a movable bridge with inherent gravity balance. This means that it can be opened and closed with minimal actuation effort, for which it is an energy friendly design. There is no need for huge countermasses as in most other movable bridge designs and which generally are challenging and expensive to incorporate. As shown in the illustrations, while opening part of the bridge moves downwards as the other part moves upwards hence compensating one another for balance. The design allows for multiple variations and for the illustrated design it was chosen to lower the bridge more then needed for perfect balance to reduce the windload on the open bridge, resulting in a best compromise of a simple and low-cost mechanical construction. 

The design of the Wing-type Bridge has been published in the following scientific articles:

Van der Wijk, V.: Inherent Gravity Force Balance in Moving Architecture with New Designs. Proc. of the ATI 2020: “Smart Buildings, Smart Cities”, August 27-29, Izmir, Turkey (2020)

Van der Wijk, V.: Methodology for analysis and synthesis of inherently force and moment-balanced mechanisms – theory and applications. Dissertation, University of Twente (2014)