Edgar Cardoso - Work

Work

On 21 December 1954, Edgar Cardoso began his university teaching career in bridge building at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the biggest Portuguese school of engineering, which belongs to the Technical University of Lisbon. He became a noted professor for many generations of civil engineers who graduated from IST.

Among the bridges that he designed is the Mosteirô bridge, a continuous truss frame beam, and the S.João railway bridge, a continuous structure one thousand metres in length. He made portico-shaped bridges and suspended bridges over the Zambezi River and Save River in Mozambique, and trussed beam bridges, over the Mondego river in Figueira da Foz, over the Kwanza river in Angola, over the Limpopo river in Xai-Xai, and in Macau. His big span concrete arcs, as on the Arrábida bridge (Porto), and in re-reinforced concrete porticos, as on the S. João railway bridge, achieved world records for that time. Since trussed beam bridges, as the Figueira da Foz bridge, the first Portuguese trussed beams bridge, until suspended bridges without rigidity beam, stabilized by the suspended cable and the inclination of kingpost whole rigidity, as in Zambeze bridge, Edgar Cardoso branded by the difference the structures engineering evolution. The Macau Taipa bridge was a challenge because of its provoctive shape, a convex superstructure. Exceptionally large sizes were a characteristic of his last inventions, such as the S. João bridge and the Funchal airport runway extension.

Beyond his two great bridge projects, Edgar Cardoso invented certain aspects of bridges in Porto. These include a reformulation of the upper tray of the Luis I Bridge and two projects that did not materialize, including the widening of the same bridge and a railroad bridge in the Arrábida Bridge, to replace the Maria Pia bridge.

His constructions include:

In Portugal

• Bridge of the Arrábida (Porto)
• Bridge of D. João
• Bridge of the Estuary of the Sousa
• Bridge of Santa Clara (Coimbra)
• Bridge of Mosteirô
• Bridge of the Mondego Estuary (Figueira da Foz)
• Bridges of the albufeira of the Caniçada
• Bridge of Barca d'Alva
• Bridge of S. Fins
• Viaduct of Entrecampos
• Bridge of Abragão
• Bridge of the Marateca
• Bridges of the albufeira of the Maranhão
• Reconversion of the tray Da Ponte Luis I
• Reinforcement Da Ponte D. Luís (Santarém)
• Expansion of the Funchal Airport bridge (Madeira)

In Portuguese Angola

• Bridge on the Kwanza
• Bridges of the railway line of Moçâmedes
• Bridges on the Cunene, Dande, Kwanzaa, Longa and Quéve rivers

In Portuguese Mozambique

• Repairs to the bridge of Boane
• Bridge of Xai Xai
• Bridge of the Pungué
• Bridge of the Save
• Bridge on the Zambezi River (Samora Machel Bridge)

In Macau

• Macau-Taipa Bridge

In Portuguese India

• Bridge of Sauguém

In Portuguese Guinea

• Bridges of the Corubal and Cacheu

Blessed with extraordinary manual ability and a solid theorical background, Cardoso constructed models of his structures and on them measured, often with methods or devices he invented himself, the necessary parameters for evaluating the structural behavior.

• Edgar Cardoso's one-kilometre-long Tete suspension bridge, Mozambique