Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16599-6
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Funding
- COWI Foundation grant [C-131.02]
- Innovation Fund Denmark grant [5189-00112B]
- PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) grant TopBridge
- Villum Foundation through the Villum Investigator Project InnoTop
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Girder design for suspension bridges has remained largely unchanged for the past 60 years. However, for future super-long bridges, aiming at record-breaking spans beyond 3km, the girder weight is a limiting factor. Here we report on a design concept, inspired by computational morphogenesis procedures, demonstrating possible weight savings in excess of 28 percent while maintaining manufacturability. Although morphogenesis procedures are rarely used in civil engineering, often due to complicated designs, we demonstrate that even a crude extraction of the main features of the optimized design, followed by a simple parametric optimization, results in hitherto unseen weight reductions. We expect that further studies of the proposed design, as well as applications to other structures, will lead to even greater weight savings and reductions in carbon footprint in a construction industry, currently responsible for 39 percent of the world's CO2 emissions.
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