With the successful hoisting and positioning of the final steel truss beam for the main navigation channel bridge of the Changtai Yangtze River Bridge, which was partially supplied and constructed by Shougang, the construction of the world’s largest span cable-stayed bridge entered the breach blocking phase. In this project, Shougang Jingtang United Iron & Steel Co., Ltd. provided a total of 124,800 tons of medium plates, all of which were used in the bridge structure. After the bridge is completed and opened to traffic, “Made in Shougang” will provide people with safe and comfortable travel.

The total length of the Changtai Yangtze River Bridge is 10.03 kilometers, with a 5,299.2-meter-long combined highway and railway section. The lower bridge deck adopts a wide asymmetric structure to achieve the function of having both intercity railways and ordinary highways on the same deck. From design to construction, the entire bridge possesses six “world’s largest” and four “world’s firsts”: the largest multi-functional load bridge with an asymmetric layout, the largest span cable-stayed bridge, the largest continuous length steel truss beam, the largest scale carbon fiber composite material stay cables, the largest span combined highway and railway steel truss arch bridge, and the largest strength parallel wire stay cables for bridges; and the first to create the thermal-adapting tower-deck restraint system (TARS) for tower beam longitudinal constraints, the first to use step open caisson foundations for erosion and self-weight reduction, the first to create a spatial diamond-shaped bridge pylon with a “steel-concrete” composite structure, and the first to create a “steel box - core steel reinforced concrete” composite cable bent tower anchorage structure.

Due to the vast span and high load-bearing requirements of the bridge, its manufacturing precision demands are extremely stringent, especially with regards to strength, toughness, and welding performance, posing rigorous quality requirements on its steel plate suppliers. To meet the needs of the customer, some units such as the Shougang Marketing Center, Jingtang Manufacturing Department, and Shougang Research Institute of Technology organized targeted product R&D work, communicated with the bridge design team, and provided the customer with material solutions.

During production, Shougang Jingtang United Iron & Steel overcame industry technical bottlenecks, including the difficulty of controlling the surface quality under special steel composition design conditions and the mismatch between the high alloy content and the marine climate corrosion resistance coefficient, to successfully develop products with performance indicators superior to the customer’s requirements. Among them, the product’s strength, low-temperature toughness, and marine climate corrosion resistance have reached advanced industry levels. To ensure the safety of the bridge’s steel structure, the technicians repeatedly studied the influence laws of different process parameters and microstructures on the yield ratio, designed a new composition system, and developed soft-phase yield ratio control technology to achieve the stable control of indicators and ensure the timely delivery of the contract.