Analyzing and redesigning changes without manually designing individual timber and steel elements
Bush Bohlman used Simcenter to reduce its carbon footprint with embedded carbon for large scale, hybrid timber structures
Bush Bohlman & Partners
Bush Bohlman & Partners, a Vancouver, Canada-based structural engineering design firm, is known for the creative expertise they bring to major engineering projects in western Canada that include hospitals, university campus buildings, government buildings, seismic retrofits, mass timber and tall wood buildings.
- 본사:
- Vancouver, Canada
- 제품:
- Simcenter S-Frame Timber
Structures can account for up to 80 percent of a building’s embodied carbon footprint; our early collaborative design approach, along with Simcenter, helps us develop options that reduce this footprint and even lead to regenerative design to provide a net positive to the environment.
About the customer
Bush Bohlman & Partners (Bush Bohlman), a Vancouver, Canada-based structural engineering design firm, is known for the creative expertise they bring to major engineering projects in western Canada. This includes hospitals, university campus buildings, government buildings, seismic retrofits, mass timber and tall wood buildings. An early adopter of mass timber structures, Bush Bohlman has extensive wood design experience in handling projects requiring the unique technical challenges faced when designing with engineered wood.
Their challenge
Bush Bohlman was required to perform the structural analysis and timber design for the British Columbia Institute of Technology’s (BCIT’s) student plaza, a pedestrian and public transport user gateway for the institute. The structure needed to establish a strong campus identity with a biophilic design and demonstrable support for sustainable building practices while ensuring structural safety according to local design codes. The hybrid mass timber structure consists of a cross-laminated timber (CLT) canopy, CLT columns and steel columns.
The pedestrian comfort walkway needed to meet sustainability, reliability and structural design requirements. For the structural engineering design team, these projects are unique and fluid. New structural models must be developed and modified for the project’s life as the requirements are updated by project stakeholders. This structure involved a pitched roof, skylight openings in the roof CLT panels and supporting columns constructed from CLT and hollow structural steel. In addition to maintaining a current structural model, the engineers needed to apply local timber design codes to analyze the complex two-way bending behavior of the cantilevering roof panels and irregular column layout.
Our solution
The engineers at Bush Bohlman opted to use Simcenter™ S-Frame™ Timber software, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services, to model and analyze the 3D structure. Siemens Digital Industries Software collaborated with Bush Bohlman to ensure the correct modeling parameters were applied while simulating the structure.
Leveraging Simcenter S-Frame Timber, the company was able to perform a hybrid analysis of the timber and steel elements in one operation and code-check the timber elements for code compliance. Using Simcenter S-Frame Timber’s built-in and customizable material databases allowed for a quick definition of the materials conforming to the proprietary CLT required. Modeling automation allowed for easier responses to structural changes resulting from design revisions.
With the help of Siemens’ technical support team, the engineers were able to overcome some technical design challenges using Simcenter S-Frame Timber strip line integration capabilities to extract the structural demands at junctions and supporting columns to design the timber connections and supports further. Strip lines gather loads at the finite element (FE) mesh nodes over their width to provide results in specific areas of interest depending on where the engineer locates the lines as well as the underlying mesh, which Simcenter S-Frame Timber automatically generates.
“Structures can account for up to 80 percent of a building’s embodied carbon footprint; our early collaborative design approach, along with Simcenter, helps us develop options that reduce this footprint and even lead to regenerative design to provide a net positive to the environment,” says Travor Whitney, partner and structural engineer at Bush Bohlman. “In response to climate change and increasing natural disasters, we plan and design projects with climate change resilience in mind.”
Results
By using Simcenter S-Frame Timber, the engineers were able to simulate the complex two-way bending behavior of the cantilevering roof panels and asymmetrical column layout. Having the model in Simcenter S-Frame Timber allowed for changes to be analyzed and redesigned, without the need to manually design individual timber and steel elements. Using Simcenter S-Frame Timber design reports presented the design calculations concisely, yet transparently, for faster and easier reviews. A 3D visualization of the finished model was available for sharing with project partners.
The engineers could also export the final model into a computer-aided design (CAD) compliant format for additional postprocessing to provide the necessary drawings for fabrication purposes.