Skylink am Flughafen Frankfurt

Skylink at Frankfurt Airport.

A multi-span bridge built at Frankfurt Airport with a length of 400 m was completed early this year. The bridge consists of a box girder that is subdivided into beams and incorporates a cable guided mini-metro©. The array of vertical and horizontal diagonals appears to be random, but is constituting an effective structural system. The necessary load bearing capacity is not a priori achieved by setting up the structure manually in a top-down approach, but emerges during an algorithmic generation process. A numerousness of possible solutions is automatically designed and structurally evaluated. By using evolutionary methods these structures are optimized until one optimal solution is found. Due to fatigue loading the connection of the diagonals to the chords had to be designed and calculated with Finite Element Method using the IIW-guideline "Fatigue design of welded joints and components".