Bridge designer sees bright future

China's booming economy and continuous infrastructure investment will offer huge opportunities for bridge designers and builders, said industry insiders.

The National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Transport issued a plan for China's road network earlier this year, which pointed out that the country would have 118,000 km of highways by the year 2030, according to Pei Minshan, general manager of CCCC Highway Consultants (HPDI), a road and bridge engineering consultancy firm under China Communications Construction.

"Bridges are the nodes that connect roads. The plan indicates that people involved in bridge projects will keep busy by 2030," Pei said.

As China is mapping out plans on strategic passages to connect Yantai and Dalian on the Bohai Bay rim, the Qiongzhou Straits, and the Taiwan Straits, the prospects would be promising for his company, Pei said.

China's bridge building sector began to take off at the beginning of the 21st century. It has since become the country with the largest number of modern bridges in the world, and more than 60 percent of the world's newly-built bridges are in China, said Xu Guoping, vice president and chief engineer of HPDI.

China now has six of the world's top 10 cable-stayed bridges, five of the world's top 10 span-suspension bridges, and five of the world's top 10 sea-crossing bridges. Most of these projects in China were designed by his company, according to Xu.

The achievements of these large bridge projects have won global recognition, and HPDI has also extended its business overseas, Xu said.

The company won a bid to design a third bridge over the Panama Canal in 2011, and obtained the supervision rights over the project's construction in 2012, according to Xu.

HPDI also combined China's first highway bridge standards, Xu said. Though China is at the cutting edge of world's bridge building technologies, Chinese bridge building standards are limited to the domestic market, and go no further than foreign-aid projects in Africa.

The company is translating its bridge building standards into English and French, to make Chinese standards better known in the world market.

"It is my dream to have our standards go abroad," Xu said.

In the future, new materials with greater strength, a higher modulus and lighter weight will be the future trend for the industry's development,Xu said. Meanwhile, bridges spans will extend further, and higher technology standards along with larger equipment will be more widely used within China's bridge construction industry.