The National Indoor Stadium will open to the public for the
first time on Wednesday, with the Artistic Gymnastics International
Invitational Tournament being the first event held there.
Ordinary audiences will be able to watch the games in the
central part of the Olympic Garden and have a closer look at the
"Bird's Nest" (The National Stadium) and the "Water Cube" (the
National Aquatics Center).
The steel roof of the National Indoor Stadium is 144 meters long
from north to south and 114 meters wide from east to west,
consisting of 2,800 tons of steel in total. The structure houses a
two-way chord-tension steel roof with the greatest span in space in
the country.
Constructing the roof of the stadium posed a huge challenge for
builders. After consulting a dozen related experts and holding 26
panel discussions and four months of debates, it was decided that
robots could fulfill this task.
Shen Yongshan, chief commander of the National Indoor Stadium
project, said that builders assembled the steel roof on the ground
and then the assembled parts would be further assembled together
onto the roof by nine robots.
The National Indoor Stadium will be an indoor stadium with most
advanced facilities and most seats in the capital. Its main
function is to organize all kinds of national and international
professional sporting events and host large sports competitions
and/or artistic performances.
Designers and builders made massive efforts to reduce noise.
Experiments showed that their labors achieved expected effects.
When a heavy rain is falling outside, it is not audible inside the
stadium. Zhang Guoqiang, the project manager, said, "The walls of
the stadium utilized nine layers of multifunctional metal complex
materials with a thickness of 25 centimeters and successfully
resolved the rainfall noise problem that commonly exists in most
stadium buildings."
Moreover, they also created special designs to reduce the noise
emanating from air-conditioners and cooling apparatuses so as to
make the building as quiet and comfortable as possible for future
audiences.
(China.org.cn by Zhang Ming'ai, November 26, 2007)