Recently, good news came from the construction site of the Shanghehang Railway Wuhu Yangtze River Rail Bridge: the first whole section of steel girder of the main bridge of this bridge was erected successfully, marking the significant progress in the construction of the world’s first high-low towers dual-purpose cable-stayed bridge invested by Beijing-Fuzhou Railway Passenger Line Anhui Ltd., Co., designed by China Railway Major Bridge Reconnaissance & Design Institute Co., Ltd. (BRDI) and constructed by China Major Bridge Engineering Co., Ltd. (MBEC). The 103,200 tons of steel used to for the bridge are exclusively supplied by Shougang Shouqin Company.

The Wuhu Yangtze River Combined Bridge is a newly built control project of the railway from Shangqiu to Hefei and to Hangzhou and a combined bridge, a bridge serving as the dedicated passenger line, the inter-city rail transit and the city’s main road all in one. Starting from Shangqiu in the north, the Shangqiu-Hefei-Hangzhou Railway connects Zhengxu High Speed Rail and Beijing-Kowloon High Speed Rail, and is linked with Beijing-Fuzhou High Speed Rail and Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu High Speed Rail in Hefei, and joins Nanjing-Hangzhou High Speed Rail and Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Rail in Hangzhou, the destination. Given the density of cities and populations along it, it is an important traffic route connecting the Central China, the Yangtze River and the Huaihe River and the Yangtze River Delta. The designed speed target is 350 kilometers per hour and is honored as the “Second Channel of East China” at home and abroad. The main span of the river-crossing river is 1234.6 meters long, which is a composite girder cable-stayed bridge with double towers, double cable planes and high-low towers. The tower on the north bank is 155 meters high and the tower on the south bank is 130.5 meters high. The upper is a two-way eight-lane urban road and the lower is a two-lane dedicated passenger line, and a two-lane inter-city railway line and a four-track line constructed according to the inter-city railway (reserved) standard.

In close proximity of an airport, where aviation height limit and navigation needs should be taken into consideration, the bridge adopts the design of large-span high-low towers, resulting in great force imposed on the cable and the girder and tensile strength up to 2000 MPa, the greatest in the world. To this end, in the construction, the requirements for the supply of bridge steel are extremely strict: the thickness is 6 mm, an ultimate limit, high strength is also required, yield stability should be controlled to be ≤ 0.86 and roughness should be controlled within 3 mm per meter. Shouqin Company won the bid for the bridge steel project of the Shanghehang Railway Wuhu Yangtze River Bridge in August 2015. The project mainly uses the special high-performance Q500qE bridge steel. The project bidding requires a number of tests such as no-plastic transition temperature verification, isothermal rupture test and tensile test of welded joints and wide plates. Based on the research and development of Q370qE, Q420qE and other series of bridge steel, Shouqin Company has successfully developed high-performance Q500qE bridge steel by relying on the equipment advantage of 4300 mm production line and repeatedly adjusting rolling rules, process parameters and so on, and successfully passed the steel welding assessment and the engineering-type crack stop performance test carried out by China Railway Shanhaiguan Bridge Group Co., Ltd., Luoyang Ship Material Research Institute and etc. With excellent product performance, the company has become one of the three manufacturers able to produce such a product across the country. According to the construction schedule, Shouqin Company began the supply for the Wuhu Yangtze River Bridge in batches in October 2015. Up to now, all the supply has been completed. As such steel is first applied in China, the successful implementation of the project marks that Shouqin Company has reached the international advanced level in the development of high-performance bridge plates.

In recent years, with the increasingly higher requirements of bridge engineering for large span, heavy load, seismic resistance (low yield ratio), heavy pull, corrosion resistance and other properties, high-performance bridge steel has become the mainstream in today’s world. Shouqin Company makes bold innovations, aims to “open up the high-end market, manufacture high-end products and serve high-end customer”, strives to break the bottleneck of technology, actively carries out the research and development of a new generation of high-performance steel bridge, establishes a product development model combined with production, marketing and research, and develops a new generation of Q370qE, Q420qE, Q500qE and other high-performance bridge steel through its own technological advantages, thus successfully providing effective protection for more than 100 domestic and foreign large-span bridges.