Complex movable suspended scaffold structure for the Hochmosel bridge

The Hochmosel bridge near Ürzig in Rhineland-Palatinate is a new road bridge in the course of the Hochmosel crossing, which will connect the Benelux countries with the Rhine-Main region as part of an international road axis. The construction project is one of the most important large-scale traffic projects nationwide. ARGE Hochmoselquerung under the leadership of SEH Engineering GmbH in Hanover has been commissioned with the construction. To close the gap between the A 60 at Wittlich and the A 60 at Mainz, the B 50 will be extended to the A 61 at Rheinböllen. The length of the new section, known as the B50neu, is around 25 kilometers in total. The heart and core of this stretch is the Hochmosel bridge, which is characterized in particular by its elevation: At a height of 160 meters, the road bridge with four lanes and two hard shoulders spans the Moselle valley over a length of 1.7 kilometers between Ürzig and Zeltingen-Rachtig. The bridge's roadway is so high that it would even tower over Cologne Cathedral.

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Hochmoselbrücke — image credits (ID:338631)

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Teupe und Söhne Gerüstbau GmbH was commissioned by SEH Engineering GmbH to erect a mobile suspended scaffold for the final coating of the underside of the bridge superstructure. The contract covers all services including design, planning, verification, erection and dismantling of the scaffold structure including the technical processing as well as the preparation of the working drawings in the TEUPE technical office.

The scaffold has a width of 2.50 m and a span of 16.0 m in total. The construction was realized as a movable, electrically driven suspended scaffold made of cantilevered lattice girders. The scaffold travels on the pigeon defense plates, which are mounted on the lower chord of the bridge. The movable scaffold structure was equipped with special trolleys to keep the surface pressure on the sheet metal as low as possible. In addition, the special undercarriages were designed so that they can be folded down to make it easier to convert the scaffold at the bridge piers. For the conversion of the scaffold structure in each bridge span, electrically synchronously controlled winches specially designed for the headroom up to a height of more than approx. 150 m are used. These temporary winches from TEUPE are positioned in the superstructure and enable uncomplicated scaffold erection from one bridge span to the next by lowering and then repositioning in the next bridge span without having to dismantle the scaffold structure into its individual parts again and again. At all bridge piers, the scaffold structure can be transported crosswise behind the respective pier after being lowered to the ground in order to be repositioned at height by means of a winch.

Construction on the major Hochmosel crossing project began in 2009, with construction of the Hochmosel Bridge starting in the fall of 2011 and opening to road traffic in November 2019.