Application case of lifting sling：Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope

Five hundred meter aperture spherical Telescope, nicknamed FAST, (also known as “China’s Tianyan”), is built in the karst depression of dawotang, Jinke village, Kedu Town, Pingtang County, Qiannan Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province. It was proposed by Chinese astronomer Nan Rendong in 1994 and officially started construction under the leadership of the National Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on March 25, 2011. It took 22 years to complete and put into operation on September 25, 2016, and entered the commissioning period On January 11, 2001, it passed the national acceptance check and put into operation. It has become the largest single aperture telescope and the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, and will maintain the leading position in the world in the next 20-30 years.

The FAST adopts a new design idea and unique location advantages, which makes it create a new mode for the construction of giant radio telescopes, breaking through the 100 Meter Engineering limit of radio telescopes. The final construction area reaches 250000 square meters, equivalent to 30 football fields.

Rigging sling manufacturing and installation engineering is one of the main technical difficulties in five hundred meter aperture spherical telescope engineering. Fast rigging sling is the largest span and the highest precision structure in the world, and it is also the first rigging sling system in the world which adopts displacement working mode. The key indexes of the project are far higher than the requirements of relevant codes at home and abroad. For example, the control accuracy of the main cable section must be less than 1 mm, and the position accuracy of the main cable node must be 5 mm. There are 6670 main cables, 2225 main cable nodes and the same number of lower cables in the whole rigging slin gwork. The total weight of rigging sling is about 1300 tons. Due to the limitation of site conditions, all cable structures must be assembled in high altitude.

After one and a half years of hard work and technical research, all indexes of fast rigging sling have reached or exceeded the design indexes. With the continuous tackling of many technical problems, 12 independent innovation patents have been formed, including 7 invention patents. These achievements have greatly promoted the research and development and manufacturing capacity of sling structure engineering in China, and will also be applied to other fields of national economy.We are proud of the five hundred meter aperture spherical telescope and China building skills.