Recently, the Rainbow Bridge over the Xinxing River in Gaoyao District, Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, officially opened to traffic. It is the first cable-stayed bridge in China to use domestically produced carbon fiber cables.
The Rainbow Bridge is a public welfare project aimed at improving the living environment in Gaoyao District. Spanning the Xinxing River, it connects the Jinshazui residential community with Jiangkou Fishing Village. Previously, residents traveling between the two sides had to take a detour that took around 20 minutes. With the bridge now open, the journey can be shortened to just five minutes.
The bridge will also link several cultural and tourism attractions, including the Jiangkou Fishing Village Specialty Food Street, the riverside greenway and Jinxiangshan Forest Park, creating a riverside pedestrian loop, expanding public spaces along the river and further optimizing the area's urban functional layout.
As China's first cable-stayed bridge built entirely with domestically produced carbon fiber cables, the technical plan of the Rainbow Bridge was reviewed and demonstrated under the leadership of Ou Jinping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The bridge adopts a dual cable-plane design and features 11 pairs of stay cables made from domestically produced carbon fiber composites. The material weighs only one-fifth as much as steel cables, while offering more than 1.5 times their strength. It is also corrosion-resistant and fatigue-resistant, making it well suited to Zhaoqing's humid and rainy climate.
Author: Liu Yue
Photo: Southcn.com
