"Kipi-Ipsala" 2nd Cross-Border Bridge
Greece | Turkey

Client

EGNATIA ODOS S.A.

Engineering

MAVRAKIS CONSULTING ENGINEERS S.A., EGIS

As a gateway between Europe and Asia, this new extradosed bridge, the first ever to be constructed in Greece, will be an essential node of the future "Corridor IV", a pan-European corridor comprising a 602 km road section between Thessaloniki and Istanbul. The new bridge with a total length of approximately 841m will replace the existing bridge (the 1st border crossing bridge) built back in the 1960’s.

The central river crossing will be a 3 span extradosed bridge with span lengths of 110m, 180m, and 110m and will be constructed using the incremental launching method. The superstructure consists of two prestressed concrete box girders placed in parallel transversally connected with prestressed reinforced concrete crossbeams. The center point of this bridge coincides with the center of the riverbed, which forms the Greek Turkish borderline.

This alignment allows to avoid pier foundations in the riverbed itself, and thus, with a clearance of 10 m between the deck’s bottom surface and the water level, the passage of ships in the case of the potential arrangement of the Evros into a navigable river.

The approach bridges are single span pretensioned girder bridges with regular span lengths of some 44m, i.e. comprising 4 spans on the Greek side and 7 spans on the Turkish side.

Due to the importance of the structure and the high seismicity of the area, the solution of seismic isolation using FPS devices and viscous dampers was chosen.