Recently, after 519 days, the 3.4-kilometer steel girder incremental launching of the Anyang-Luoyang Expressway Yellow River Grand Bridge was successfully completed. This construction broke the national record for the longest continuous incremental launching and also marked an important breakthrough in key technologies for long-distance, large-span incremental launching construction in China.

The Anyang-Luoyang Expressway Yellow River Grand Bridge is an important component of the Beijing-Wuhan Expressway, a parallel route of the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Expressway in the national highway network plan, and a key construction project of Henan Province's expressway "13445 Project." With a total length of 15.223 kilometers, it is the longest highway bridge over the Yellow River and the highway bridge with the largest steel structure consumption in the inland region.

"First, a launching platform is set up to assemble the prefabricated girder segments, then walking jacks lift the steel girder and place it steadily onto temporary supports—this constitutes one launching stroke," said Liu Jiang, chief engineer of the Yellow River Expressway Section 2 project of CCCC Second Highway Engineering Co., Ltd. Incremental launching construction can minimize safety risks, improve construction efficiency, and at the same time reduce the impact on the Yellow River wetlands, effectively protecting the Yellow River ecology.

In addition, smart construction technologies were applied. A 5G-based "unmanned" launching system, together with a remote intelligent monitoring platform, collects key parameters and data of the steel girder in real time during construction, enabling automatic identification, judgment, and decision-making for launching operations and achieving 8-millimeter precision control of the steel girder launching axis deviation.

"Since the first quarter, the project has completed an investment of 402 million yuan, construction has proceeded in a scientific and orderly manner, and the launching was completed three months ahead of the original schedule," said Li Pan, deputy general manager of Henan Yellow River Expressway Co., Ltd. He stated that next, personnel and equipment input will continue to be increased to ensure the smooth opening of the Anyang-Luoyang Expressway Yellow River Grand Bridge next year.