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Fit for a King's Court

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 07-2015    Views: 3465      







Waterman Group chooses Scandinavian quality from StruSoft to design the concrete elements of Kings Court - the prestigious new Covent Garden development

Covent Garden is one of the best-loved, most iconic districts in Central London. Buzzing with the excitement of opera and theatre land, Covent Garden is a destination for food lovers and fashionistas alike, and any new development in the area must pass the sternest tests in terms of design and quality before they are accepted.

One development to pass the rigorous planning approvals is Kings Court, a new seven story reinforced concrete structure in the heart of the select area. The scheme will open up an additional pedestrian route to transform the existing private courtyard into a new public area, named Kings Court.

The reinforced concrete structure is part of an ambitious development with a mix of new and refurbished buildings to regenerate the lesser used parts of the area, establishing new high quality residential, retail and restaurant space in Central London.

The London-based Waterman Group were appointed as the structural engineers for Kings Court, and used StruSoft FEM-Design to design the concrete elements of the project according to Eurocode 2. According to Massimo D'Ignazio, Structural Design Engineer at Waterman Group "Traditional British Standard codes of practice are now becoming obsolete, so we are trying to promote the use of Eurocode on all of our new projects. That is why we needed a structural design package we could rely on, such as StruSoft's FEM-Design concrete package." He explained further how the design of concrete elements is very simple and clear with StruSoft FEM-Design. "We have learned to appreciate how easy it is to check the results in detail assisted by colour maps, 3D graphs, contour lines, colour palettes and so on."

For Kings Court, StruSoft FEM-Design was used to analyse the overall structural behaviour of the building and to design all the concrete elements - such as columns, beams, walls and slabs. "Due to the large number of load combinations required by Eurocode, StruSoft FEM-Design has been very useful to analyse the structure with only selected load combinations considered in each analysis run."

StruSoft FEM-Design is advanced modelling software using finite element analysis for the design of load-bearing concrete, steel and timber structures according to Eurocode. It provides a unique, user-friendly working environment using familiar CAD tools to make model creation and structure editing simple and intuitive. The quick and easy nature of StruSoft FEM-Design makes it ideal for all types of construction tasks from single element design to global stability analysis of large structures.

StruSoft FEM-Design allows users to utilise combinations of all three of the above methods of analysis, enabling them to consider 2nd order effects - occasions where a simple analysis is not considered sufficient to analyse secondary forces dependent upon initial results - especially with analyses of large moments where the stiffness is largely reduced by cracking.

A striking example of this is demonstrated with Kings Court, where uplift, due to 'ground heave' is prevalent. StruSoft FEM-Design was used to evaluate the important phenomenon caused by the expansion of London clay, upon which Covent Garden is built, under certain conditions. "With StruSoft FEM-Design, it has been possible to consider this behaviour because the software has a powerful non-linear calculation method and allows the user to set free rotation components."

For those unfamiliar with StruSoft, the company has other applications fit for the building industry. IMPACT is an advanced software application for designing prefabricated building elements. It has been specifically developed to handle different types of prefabricated building elements and the connections between them. Users can design an entire building, create 3D BIM models from which can generated shop drawings, assembly drawings and reports. The information includes reinforcement, cast-in material, joints, electrical- and other components for slabs, hollow core- and form slabs, walls, sandwich- and double walls and columns and beams.

WIN-Statik, another application from StruSoft, is a powerful but easy to use software. WIN-Statik is used for common engineering design tasks enabling engineers to design and analyse columns, beams, sections, frames and pre-stressed elements according to a chosen design code - in this case Eurocode (EN 1992:1-1-2004(E)) standard or with national annexes. Using moments and shear forces to ascertain longitudinal re-reinforcement and stirrups in concrete beams. WIN-Statik also contains analysis routines for things like cracked section deflection analysis for specifying reinforcements for cracks and displacements. This method of analysis looks at instability using either stiffness or curvature methods of analysis, or can be used to check biaxial bending.



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