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Like virtual Meccano

Editorial Type:     Date: 07-2015    Views: 2789      







Tekla Structural Designer combines analysis with design, enabling engineers to configure optimum design solutions for buildings within one package

With the best will in the world, structural analysis and detailing often seems to come across as a peripheral activity to architecture - the constrained bits and bobs that have to be sorted out to make an architect's designs stand up, resulting in complex collaboration between structural designers and architects to find an optimum design solution.

So I was delighted to be able to sit down with Chris Wilson at Tekla's new offices in Leeds and learn all about Tekla Structural Designer, a revolutionary piece of software that gives structural engineers a freer hand in analysing and designing buildings, enabling them to compare alternative design schemes and cost implications.

It's almost like going from the rigid constraints of Lego to Meccano. For those of a certain age who will remember it fondly, Meccano contained metal beams, panels, rods and wheels, all of which could be joined together with miniature nuts and bolts to create complex structures. It certainly helped you learn about gravity and torsion from an early age, and invariably most sets contained, after a couple of years, a pile of bent and twisted pieces of metal from designs 'that went wrong'. Construction possibilities were only limited by the most obvious physical boundaries and there was immense satisfaction in being able to build.

The same freedom to explore is evident in Tekla's Structural Designer, and, although the ends must justify the efforts put in, the satisfaction levels will remain equally high. Tekla Structural Designer is a revolutionary concrete and steel design application and the first analysis and design software release from Tekla since their acquisition of CSC in 2013. Whilst Tekla's existing portfolio of software deals with the detailed models and drawings, Tekla Structural Designer now covers all structural analysis and design requirements, linking through to their existing software to provide design from scheme all the way through to detailed design.

There's an interesting mini-history here about the evolution of engineering design solutions. Fastrak Building Designer, another CSC application for the design of steel frames and connections for building large warehouses, was acquired alongside CSC's concrete solution, Orion, and Solve for FE Analysis. They were on track to become a single application before the Tekla acquisition, and were actually written specifically with BIM integration in mind, before BIM became a common term for the process.

It is now, post-acquisition, the only analysis and design solution available specifically written for BIM, the full integration being fundamental to the initial scope, whereas other, older applications have had to retro-fit some rudimentary BIM integration links into their workflows to handle it.

The process of analysis and design is automated and straightforward. After importing a Tekla Structure or Revit model, or creating your own model directly within the application, you can load the structure and Tekla Structural Designer will automatically analyse and refine the design of each and every member (traditionally, engineers probably guessed the beam sizes at first and then modified them after the first results of the analysis come through).

Tekla Structural Designer automatically creates the underlying sophisticated analytical model, incorporating a powerful Finite Element engine, from the physical model and automates the design saving time and guesswork. This allows the user to concentrate on the important design decisions rather than the intricacies of an analytical problem.

Alternatively you can use the architect's drawings to start a model, turn off the layers that you don't want, trace over the architect's drawing with the structural elements you need, then test them to make the building work, adding columns, concrete walls, beams, braces, floor slabs and so on. You would then repeat the process for floors and basements, etc., designing the shell and concrete structure of the building from the architect's plans - collaborating, of course, with the architect whilst you are doing it. Structural components can come from manufacturers catalogues or be custom designed on the spot.



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