The Fourth Bridge over the Panama Canal
Panama City, Panama

Design

SENER & HPDI

Construction

CHINA COMMUNICATIONS CONSTRUCTION COMPANY LTD & CHINA HARBOUR ENGINEERING COMPANY LTD

Independent design check

AYESA-CFC S.L. (Carlos Fernandez Casado)

This project involves the crossing of the Panama Canal through a new cable-stayed bridge with a main span of 485 m and side spans of 240 m, resulting in a total length of 965 m for the main bridge. The deck is of composite type, with a total width of nearly 37 m.

The towers have an H shape with two transverse beams. One located below the deck level, housing the bearings, fuses, and dampers, and another below the cable anchorage level. The cable-stay system is symmetrical, consisting of two planes of 19 cables per tower anchored at the deck ends, making a total of 152 stays. The average height of the towers is 185 m above the existing ground level. The main cable-stayed bridge is connected to two access viaducts with single-cell prestressed concrete box-girder decks — one on the east side and the other on the west side of the canal.

The model developed in SOFiSTiK was used for static load analyses (serviceability and ultimate limit states) and dynamic analyses under seismic conditions, through both modal-spectral calculations and nonlinear time-history analyses using accelerograms. In addition, dynamic studies were carried out to determine the maximum forces and energy dissipated by the entire system and by each individual device, as well as analyses of the bridge behaviour during the construction stage (CSM).