Development and Design of an Innovative Opening Mechanism for a Footbridge

Opening bridges are often the only way of responding to the challenges of construction projects. Some recently built movable footbridges differ distinctly from the conventional solutions, showing that this domain offers possibilities of creative exploration. This paper describes the research and design of an innovative opening mechanism for a long-span footbridge in response to the requirements of the port of Ouchy, close to Lausanne in Switzerland. It opens with a classification of opening mechanisms according to their degrees of freedom to provide a general overview of existing design solutions. It then proposes three innovative opening mechanisms for the given site. For the preferred solution, the influence of the geometrical parameters on the structural behaviour during the opening is analysed and design solutions for both the structural and non-structural elements are proposed and illustrated on drawings. The paper concludes with the experimental demonstration of the proposed mechanism on a reduced scale model.