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A 15,000 piece glass jigsaw

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 07-2014    Views: 4997   






The power of Digital Prototyping using Autodesk Inventor has enabled 4th Dimensional Façade Solutions to design and construct a 21st century masterpiece, according to key personnel Jason Dent and Peter Crawley. Charles Clarke reports

The South Australian Health Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) headquarters building in Adelaide was commissioned by the South Australian Government as a prestigious, state of the art facility that reflected the confidence and capability within the Institute. SAHMRI is building a team of more than 600 researchers, who will work together in the search for better treatments and cures for some of the world's most challenging diseases.

The façade stands like a bubble around the building. It is the most complex steel structure ever built in the Southern Hemisphere, being made up of 15,000 triangular glass facets, and it is almost completely free-standing. The steel structure consists of 144,000 unique parts, all serial coded and embossed. Each triangle is made up of an aluminium frame, sealing gaskets, and a panel of which the majority are glass. The triangular assemblies are then mounted to a steel sub-frame. There are over 700 permutations and each individual part had to be drawn separately.

The whole supply and build contract for the façade alone was around AUD $35 million. iLogic, one of Autodesk Inventor's design automation utilities, gave designers the ability to automate much of the process by placing generic components and configuring them using a standard toolbox, ensuring adherence to design standards and modelling consistency throughout the entire project. Despite intensive mathematical rationalisation, almost every piece of steel, aluminium and glass was unique. The majority of the building structure was complete before any part of the façade had been designed or detailed.

THE CHALLENGE
The architects had developed a 3D zero thickness surface model of the inside of the desired façade. The highest priority and the biggest challenge was ordering $10m of glass due to manufacturing lead times, before anything else was designed. Creating cutting details for the glass was the first challenge, followed by the details of the window frames and then the supporting steel.

The design of the supporting steel between the glass and the existing building was particularly challenging as there was no possibility to change either the glass (as it was pre-ordered) or the supporting structure as it was already there.

Curving triangular structures are typically built using round hollow steel sections, but this façade design called for rectangular sections thereby dramatically increasing the complexity of the steel fabrication. Unlike a jigsaw where the challenge is to guess where every part goes, labelling over 250,000 components was vital to ensuring no guessing was necessary on the construction site.

THE SOLUTION
"All of the software vendors we spoke to shrank from this challenge," says Jason Dent, Founder of 4th Dimensional Façade Solutions. "Autodesk Inventor had proven itself on several previous projects, but no one had tried anything this big, so we imported the surface model and the project just evolved from there." This evolution included a design team with nearly 30 individuals involved through 10 cities and 3 continents.

"Being able to 'speak 3D' was the only language that worked," says Peter Crawley, 3D Consultant from Autodesk reseller CADPRO Systems Ltd. "If we hadn't used Inventor it would have meant in excess of 200,000 2D drawings each taking an average of 20 minutes for each drawing."

"In detailing the glass, we realised that you can't just thicken the surface model because you get big gaps as the triangles move round the outside of a curve," says Crawley. An intelligent iLogic part was developed that looked at each triangle and its angle to each of its neighbours, which then sized the glass accordingly. This "true shape" of all 15,000 triangles was then used to 'profile cut' the glass. 2D drawings were produced using a special tool for Inventor for checking purposes, saving thousands of hours of repetitive 2D detailing work," says Dent, who added "It's just a shame we couldn't check them as quickly!" After managing to get the glass ordered, the window frames needed building.

The size of every triangle was automatically extracted to a spreadsheet, which fed a new Inventor iLogic window frame assembly. "We didn't model every frame," says Crawley. "We just created a few hundred for clash detection with the steel." Autodesk Inventor was particularly useful when it came to analysing how the various glazing components came together at a junction or a node point. The junction between the glazing triangles is essentially a six sided node like a hexagon.



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