SHEIKH ZAYED BRIDGE

The Sheikh Zayed Bridge, which links Abu Dhabi and Saadiyat Islands to the Gulf Shore over the Maqta Channel, was designed by the renowned British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. The bridge is 842 metres long and is composed of three main arches, the largest of which reaches 63 metres above the main road deck. It was officially opened on 25th November 2010 after 7 years of construction and an overall cost of 300 million US Dollars, using 5,000 tonnes of pre-stressed steel, 2,000 tonnes of foundation steel and almost 500 tonnes of concrete.

The flowing geometry of the arches takes inspiration from the desert’s undulating sand dunes, and its simple beauty is greatly enhanced by the lighting installation initially designed by Rogier van der Heide. The installation uses over 300 colour changing luminaires to illuminate the arches, with a fully redundant looped control system using a fibre backbone and network cabling running Art-Net – an industry standard protocol allowing multiple DMX universes to be transmitted over a network infrastructure and converted back to DMX512 for control of the luminaires.

Van Damme Smart Control DMX 2 pair was specified for the DMX512 cable element of the installation, and the required 14,000 metres was supplied by Van Damme’s UAE Distributor NMK Electronics.