Yesterday (October 31), the Xiangshan Bridge, a key control project of the Zhongshan Eastern Outer Ring Expressway located at the Pearl River Estuary, was successfully joined together. Resembling a massive "steel organ," it now stands as a new landmark in Zhongshan.
At 11:30 a.m. on the 31st, construction workers on the upper deck of the Xiangshan Bridge operated submerged arc welding machines to weld the final steel box girder segment. With the completion of the last meter of welding in the closure segment, the bridge achieved full integration. The next phase will involve deck paving and the installation of ancillary bridge facilities.
Spanning the Hengmen Waterway in the Pearl River Estuary, the Xiangshan Bridge is located in Zhongshan Torch High-Tech Zone. Its name derives from Zhongshan's ancient moniker, "Xiangshan." The bridge, designed like a "steel organ," features a 270-meter-high tower and an 880-meter main span, with a total length of 1,776 meters. It adopts a double-deck, bidirectional 16-lane design—eight lanes on the upper deck for expressway traffic and eight reserved lanes on the lower deck. Its deck width and span rank among the world's leading standards for double-deck steel truss cable-stayed bridges.
The bridge's inverted "Y"-shaped pylon, standing 270 meters tall, was constructed using hydraulic climbing formwork, allowing it to "grow" automatically. The project team employed BIM technology for digital pre-assembly, ensuring precision in material cutting and installation to meet design standards.
The steel truss girder installation, likened to "threading a needle in the air," posed significant challenges. The bridge comprises 79 segments weighing a total of 79,000 tons, with the heaviest single segment reaching about 1,300 tons. These segments were hoisted to a height of 50 meters above the water for precise alignment. To achieve this, the construction team developed China's largest QMD1500t deck crane for highway use, equipped with an intelligent control and monitoring system to track critical data such as lifting weight, height, and stress in real time. This "aerial Hercules" enabled millimeter-level precision, with alignment errors kept within 3 millimeters.
The successful closure of the Xiangshan Bridge accelerates progress toward the full opening of the first phase of the Zhongshan Eastern Ring Expressway. The main line spans approximately 55.6 kilometers, linking Foshan, Zhongshan, and Zhuhai. Upon completion, it will directly connect with the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link, forming part of the "One Ring, Three Horizontals, Three Verticals" expressway network alongside the Nanzhong Expressway and Zhongkai Expressway. This infrastructure will enhance connectivity among core cities in the Greater Bay Area, providing robust transportation support for regional industrial collaboration and innovation.