Dr. Stephen Bright is a British bridge engineer with a PhD in Lightweight Bridge Decks. After years of working on road, railway and foot bridges, he designed this ingenious EasiBridge, a portable crossing system. It’s essentially a suspension bridge flipped upside down:
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“EasiBridge uses 1.5m long, optimised ladder sections with a bespoke (EasiLock) jointing system to ensure no loss of strength or stiffness at multiple section joints. Combined with a rope-stiffening system, telescopic masts and variable tensioning elements, EasiBridge structures are half the weight and treble the span of incumbent systems.”
“Simple short spans, up to 6m, can be formed from plain ladder sections with just three sets of EasiLock joints.”
– All EasiBridge structures are man-portable; a 12m bridge can be transported by a single person, 18m bridges transported by just 2 personnel
– 18m bridges can be installed and crossed by a single person in under 20 seconds, with no prior access to the far bank
– Bridges are “launched” into place using a Patented cantilever launch/inversion technique
– Installation is completed entirely from the home bank and in near silence
– Bridges can be recovered and extracted for re-use as quickly as they are installed.
The design can also be scaled up and made into something more robust:
After five years of development, Bright’s invention was acquired by military equipment manufacturer Ban-Air, and Bright was hired by the company as Technical Director. The product has been re-branded LADX.
Source: core77