Edgar Cardoso

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Edgar Cardoso (born 11th May 1913, Resende - died 5th July 2000, Porto) was a noted Portuguese civil engineer and university professor. In Portugal, Edgar Cardoso was a pioneer of experimental analysis of structures and of high precision instruments development for measure mechanical sizes in the little models and in his own works.

[edit] Early life

Cardoso was born in Resende, and studied civil engineering at the University of Porto, in Porto, where he graduated in 1937. In 5th of August 1935 Edgar Cardoso received a guideline to carry through its first period of training in the Port of Leixões, for the study of the engineering works performed on the Port under the authority of engineer Gervásio Leite. The Cardoso's report entered in the university on 23rd October, and was appreciated and classified with a 16 points grade (out of 20) by the professors Teotónio Rodrigues and Antão de Almeida Garrett. Edgar Cardoso still carried out at least one other period of training in Bragança in the JAE (national authority for the Portuguese roads), already in 1937, the year he graduated in civil engineering from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto. Another notable academic document from the years he was a student was the report of a practical work that consisted of the full calculation of a swimming pool.

[edit] Work

In 21st 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 at the IST.

Among the bridges that he designed, is the Mosteirô bridge that is the continuous truss frame beam and the S.João railway bridge, a continuous structure with thousand metres of length. He still made portico shape bridges, suspended bridges, over Zambeze and Save rivers in Mozambique, and trussed beam bridges, over Mondego river in Figueira da Foz, over Kwanza river in Angola and over Limpopo river in Xai-Xai, as well as in Macau. In the big span concrete arcs, as in Arrábida bridge (Porto), and in re-reinforced concrete porticos, as in S.João railway bridge, reached world records on 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 by the shape, by the provocation of a convex superstructure. The exceptionality of the big sizes is the expression of your last interventions, as the S.João bridge and the runway Funchal airport extension.

Beyond the two great bridges projected by him, Edgar Cardoso made some interventions on the bridges of Porto. A reformulation of the upper tray of 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 substitute the bridge Maria Pia.

In Portugal:

Bridge of the Arrábida (Porto)
Bridge of S. 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 Bark 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 (Madeira)

In Angola:

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

In Mozambique:

Repairing Ponte of Boane
Bridge of Xai Xai
Bridge of the Pungué
Bridge of the Save
Bridge on the Zambeze (Tete)

In Macau:

Macau-Taipa Bridge

In Goa:

Bridge of Sauguém

In Guinea-Bissau:

Bridges of the Corubal and Cacheu

Blessed with an extraordinary manual ability and solid theorical background, Cardoso constructed models of his structures and through them measured, many times with methods or devices invented by him, the necessary parameters to the evaluation of the structural behavior.