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Marina Bay Sands - Use of API
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| Aerial View From Marina Bay |
Integrated Resort - Integrated GSA
Arup Structural Engineer Juan Maier has recently taken advantage of the COM Interface offered in GSA on the multi-billion dollar project, the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort in Singapore.
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| Complex Geometrical Form Structures |
Faced with the challenges of analyzing and designing several large steel structures with highly complex geometric form and over 5000 separate elements each, Juan developed a program using the COM Interface to link directly with GSA's analysis model.
"With large structural models that are highly stiffness driven, finding suitable section sizes that work for every element in the model is actually harder than it sounds". The program was initially written to deal with the shear number of elements that were required to be analysed, designed and sized to the relevant codes of practice under several different load cases until a solution could be found for all the elements in the structure.
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| Optimisation Results |
The true potential of GSA's COM Interface was soon realised and Juan was able to customise and tailor the program to the specific needs of this project such that it would run a computer automated numerical algorithm to determine the optimum steel weight of the structure whilst still conforming to the relevant design standards.
In this particular case, the geometric form was not modified. Instead, through an iterative process, the sizes of the structural elements were continuously substituted, analysed, designed and resized based on the results of the analysis until the structure with the least steel-weight was found.
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| Linked to GSA via the COM Interface |
Not only was this an effective and highly efficient method of managing the data from large structural models, it also offered the design engineers the opportunity to fine tune the steel weight of the structures in this project which consequently translated into a real cost saving for the client.
Like this case study, automated programs using the COM Interface can be developed to optimize structures for a variety of purposes such as least-cost solution, least weight solution and fastest procurement to name a few, or a combination of two or more of these are also feasible. The possibilities are unlimited!
