The Widening of Westgate Bridge in Melbourne

Westgate, one of Australia’s largest bridges, was expanded in 2010 using Epsilon Composite’s Carbolam® solutions, becoming the largest project in the history of carbon fiber.

Westgate Bridge in Melbourne

A major project!

The Westgate Bridge in Melbourne is a slender structure of 2.5 km in length, with a span of 336 meters in the center and a height of 58 meters, which had to be completely renovated and expanded in 2010.

The client: BASF

The challenge provide a very large quantity of high modulus plates in record time Carbolam® (in order to minimize the duration of the work and to immobilize the structure), while also guaranteeing a high level of quality to ensure the long-term safety of bridge users.

The solutions provided by Epsilon Composite : unrivalled production capacity to offer record delivery times, and perfect control of the pultrusion process in order to meet the customer’s technical specifications.

Westgate Bridge - Melbourne

Result : Epsilon was selected by BASF for this project to reinforce the bulkhead on the upper surface by inserting more than 40km of Carbolam® carbon plates, making in total, more a total of more than 20 tons of carbon fiber used on the bridge.
With this, Westgate became the largest carbon reinforcement project in the world!


The main goal of this project was to add 2 traffic lanes on this highway bridge between Monash and Melbourne, going from 2×4 to 2×5 lanes in order to improve the traffic (more than 200,000 vehicles / day).

For this pharaonic project, Epsilon Composite dedicated 3 pultrusion lines to transform 25 tons of carbon fibers and epoxy matrix and ship 40 km of Carbolam flat laminates by plane and by ship.

To ensure the treacibility, we implemetend for the first time a bar-code system to handle 6,000 different parts from 3 to 14m long. Without a doubt, this construction job marked the history of carbon composite reinforcement . It allowed Epsilon to demonstrate its ability to mobilize considerable ressources in record time and achieve the delivery targets (quality and quantity, on schedule) to ensure the success of the project !

Read this Composite World article to learn more about this project.

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