For those of you who missed it, there’s something fun happening in London this weekend- and I’m going to be there. Yes, it’s the AEC Hackathon! To make life a bit more exciting (and to allow me to get all the dull things I’d usually do on a weekend out the way), I’ve decided to make a repeat of my last Construct//Disrupt attempt and blog live from the event.

So once again, let me invite you to check-out Being Brunel Live!

Being Brunel: Live

As the event is a two and half days long, expect updates to be a touch more periodic than the steady stream I achieved last time. As always, feel free to drop me a line (perhaps on Twitter) with any questions, comments or suggestions and I’ll try and answer, respond or action them!

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About the Author

David Knight

• David is a senior engineer at Flint & Neill Ltd, and part of the organising committee for the IABSE Future of Design London conference. He enjoys bridges, bikes, boats and singing, and his girlfriend gets embarrassed when he looks at how handrails are put together in public.
• Find out more: Twitter

What is there to say about the Future of Design conferences that hasn’t been said before? Tom has reviewed previous conferences with aplomb and we (as the organising committee for FoD London 2015) are aiming to match those heights again. So what do we have in store?

We have Paul Westbury, former CEO of Buro Happold, and now of Laing O’Rourke, talking about why he moved from a major consultancy to the major contractor, and what plans he has for the industry of the future. We have a panel debating whether public money should be spent on private projects. We have an artist and a contractor (Andy Scott and Tim Burton of SH Structures) talking in tandem about the challenges of realising a pair of 30m tall horse heads. We have (new this year!) the judging of a design competition for young designers for a new pedestrian bridge over Bow Creek in East London.

Why should you come? It’s the best opportunity all year to meet other young designers, and to be inspired by the best in the industry. There is a dinner. The tickets are pretty cheap, and it even counts as CPD. It will be held at Imperial College on the 10th September 2015, and tickets are available here.

What else is happening? We have a bit of a focus on materiality – Brian Eckersley (of Eckersley O’Callaghan, winners of the IStructE Supreme Award 2014) talking about structural uses of glass; John O’Mara from Herzog & de Meuron on highest quality concrete; and Frank Meibach talking about some adventurous timber footbridges. Our other panel discussion is looking at why engineers have become invisible – and is this a good thing? And of course we have the best young presenters who have submitted papers for inclusion in the conference.

Go To The IABSE FoD London 2015

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A good few weeks ago I suspended my disbelief and took the opportunity to pretend civil engineering is just as full of young and trendy start-ups as those cool cats at Silicone Valley. BaseStone’s second Construct/Disrupt definitely set the scene; beer, pizza, checked shirts- even the engineers who had turned up made an effort look a little trendy. But the stars of the show were the new technologies on display; and that’s what I want to draw your attention to today.

Bill Clee (Asset Mapping)

Winning me over with the quip: “Standards are a bit like toothbrushes – everyone has one and no one wants to use anybody else’s.” Clee introduced us to Asset Mapping’s technique of doing away with the archaic, propriety and often incompatible interfaces that link our building services and using a combination of open standards and cheap sensors to monitor a company’s physical assets. This internet of things means that businesses can know the state of their estates and plan accordingly.

Jozef Dobos (3D Repo)

As something between a software and structural engineer; I find myself constantly at odds with the way both industries manage data. Anyone who has seen the wonders of GitHub will understand; and clearly Dobos has- because 3D Repo is git for drawings. Open source (e.g. free to use and collaborate to improve); it allows you to view, monitor and merge changes to BIM models. I can only hope that the oddities of “common formats” are straightened out so that this can be the de facto standard and we can all get on with our lives.

Fred Mills (The B1M)

I like the B1M. It’s the ultimate resource to get you enthusiastic about BIM; with weekly videos from some of the current through leaders in the business. But more than that, it was good to hear Mills’ views on the need for our industry to adapt- “organisations can no longer hoard their information; we are judged by out contribution”; as designers we need to focus on our ability to innovate- not just hoard our old innovations.

James Bowles (Freeform 3D)

Just as the industry is coming to the terms with the third dimension, Bowles has taken to talking about the forth (and the last of the real dimensions that BIM inhabits). Toting that projects undertaking 4D modelling end up being executed faster (something I dearly want to believe; but take it with a pinch of salt); he predicts that in the future we will model full cities in 4D to see how the projects interact and better manage the interfaces.

Freddie Talberg (PIE Mapping)

I cycle in London. So when Tablerg announced that trucks turning left kill cyclists, I vowed to avoid left turning trucks forever. Luckily PIE Mapping is working to make my life easier by preventing trucks turning left forever; well- almost. By combining their mapping and routing knowledge with live data across London they are working with construction (and logistics) companies to ensure that heavy vehicles are routed across the city in such a way that they do avoid this dangerous manoeuvre at cyclist heavy junctions!

Oluwaseyi Sosanya (Gravity Sketch)

Engineers sketch; in fact, I was once congratulated in an interview for reaching for a pen a paper to sketch with. Anyone who has had to convert a collection of dodgy hand-sketches into a beautiful 3D model will know, however, that sketching well is an art- and not one widely practised. Sosanya has the answer- just sketch in 3D. Gravity sketch is an up and coming app that allows you to form a mobile plane with a tablet; adding the third dimension to your sketch-pad. You can even combine it with VR technology to allow you to visualise and manipulate the sketches of others.

Henry Stuart (Visualise)

What isn’t construction doing that every other industry is? Well, I could write a list; but for Stuart, it’s forming Virtual Reality experiences. We deliver schemes worth billions to clients who have seen little more than an architectural rendering (on a summers day, with a suspiciously diverse crowd hanging about). Imagine how much better we could realise their expectations with a full VR experience; allow them to meander across the bridge that isn’t there- or sit down in the tiny luxury apartment to be. More than that, we could be running full virtual executions of complex designs to predict problems before we get to them on a Christmas possession…

So there you have it; it might seem like the industry is just plodding along compared to our technological counterparts- but there’s still an undercurrent of disruption to help shake things up. Here’s to whatever these hopeful startups become!

The post Disrupting Construction appeared first on Being Brunel.

About the Author

Ed Dablin

• Ed is a recently chartered Senior Engineer working for AECOM in Altrincham with 5 years experience working on a range of bridge projects ranging from long span bridges to rail bridge reconstructions. Outside of work he is a STEM Ambassador and has recently been helping to deliver a number of IABSE events in Manchester.
• Find out more: LinkedIn

Ed.(itor): What’s that? Another post about an IABSE Future of Design event? Well- what can I say; they’re good events. I’m now a veteran (this’ll be my third), and the mix of young engineers, fascinating presenters, and a chance to rub shoulders with the greats at a decent sit-down dinner makes for the sort of event that reminds you why you became an engineer in the first place.

I can’t tell you how excited I am that tickets for the IABSE Future of Design North 2015 conference are now selling quickly. And sell they should! Some of the most eminent structural engineers and architects will be coming to present at the one day conference being held in Manchester on March 27^th.

The conference presents a fantastic opportunity for young professionals like me to get involved. Having been for the first time to the 2014 conference in London last year, it is going to be a must-attend event on my yearly calendar. I met lots of like-minded people in the industry from young designers, celebrated designers to company CEOs. My personal highlight was sitting next to my engineering idol from my whitbybird summer placement days, Mark Whitby, at the evening dinner.

The Young Designers Competition is open to all design professionals and students under 35 and all you need to do to enter is submit a one page paper on some of your innovative work/research. The authors of the 12 papers judged to be the best will be invited to the conference to present for a chance to win prizes and will be awarded a seat at the evening dinner in a most unique setting.

But you don’t have to submit a paper to get involved. The conference features two debates which get particularly interesting with animated discussion amongst the audience and panellists needing no encouragement from the chairs. This year Antony Oliver (Infrastructure Intelligence) will be returning to chair one of the two discussions and Professor Paul Lambert (Mott MacDonald) will be chairing the other, after successfully moderating October’s well-received Journey to Success event in Manchester.

The event aims to promote design and inspire future generations. Hence the majority of delegates are young professionals in the building or bridge industries. It really isn’t like any other conference as, now being a flagship conference for IABSE, it attracts some of the most high profile speakers to present, but at a price that is accessible to young people (only £50 per ticket this year). Always organised by young professionals, I was delighted to be asked to be part of the five-person team (Alison, Hunter, Ian & Jason) to deliver the increasingly popular format in the North of England for the first time. It is great to be a part of expanding IABSE’s reach.

Through events like this, I am getting a strong feeling that IABSE is fast becoming one of the leading organisations for designers, constructors, researchers, clients and others to meet, network and discuss good construction. It is this sharing of knowledge that IABSE, an international organisation with members in over 100 countries worldwide, is all about and what drives us to organise these events.

So encourage your boss to give you the day as CPD. Better yet, enter a paper into the Young Designers Competition (Deadline: 6^th February). This is not an event to miss!

Get Your Future of Design North 2015 Ticket

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I’m sure you’ve all been at the edge of your seats waiting for the second part from the highlights of the IABSE 2014 Future of Design conference; and for that I can only apologise- some times life gets in the way. I expect it’s a good sign, however, that a day long conference results in enough highlights to span more than one article.

In the second half of the conference there was a series of competitive presentations by actual young designers; keen to share their papers about the innovative design, or structural research they have undertaken. There’s also a short discussion on a topic pertinent to the structural engineering profession. I’ve given it my best to try and capture the key points- but, like most short talks; there’s a wealth of technical detail that makes a summary difficult to achieve.

Mungo Stacy (Parsons Brinckerhoff)

Mungo compared the principles of civil engineering to the famous commandments of product design by Dieter Rams: it should be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, designed to the last detail, sustainable and efficient. By accepting this, the future of design has us becoming leaders in design technology, building a sustainable future of efficient structures.

To me the more pertinent part was a discussion of engineers and our perceived lack of value within society. He argues that we cannot just demand to be valued, but must prove ourselves- remembering that once we were the pioneers. The built environment is the fruit of our design and we have an obligation to it; we cannot continue soliciting our skills to build whatever the clients demand, off-loading our responsibilities to politicians and ‘quick-win’ economics- we must return to acting as custodians for it, and there is where we will find respect again.

Young Designers

Jose Fernandes (Parsons Brinckerhoff), Prejay Patel (Mott MacDonald), David Knight (Flint & Neill), Elyes Aidi (Parsons Brinckerhoff), Katerina Vatti (Tony Hogg Design), Despina Tsertikidou (WSP)

This segment of the event celebrated some achievements of younger designers; who all presented papers as part of a larger competition. Jose started by introducing us to a tool he has created as part of his research into bridge dynamics. Intriguingly it allows engineers to get a quick indication of the effects of dynamic loading on simple bridges using nothing more than Excel! Prejay’s talk took us in an unexpected direction, where he discussed the finite element analysis of the pelvis- and how the use of similar ‘meso-scale‘ modelling could help engineers more efficiently assess complex structures.

David gave a talk on a project he had worked on; the Greenwich Reach Swing Bridge. What made this structure noteworthy was the use of a flat plate diagonal truss thru-section, which increased the buckling capacity by 50%. Elyes then shocked us all by bringing in a bit of the Old Wye Bridge– presumably to prove how urgently it needed repairs. More interesting than the technical side of the works, however, was its change management: which involved linking in a live spreadsheet log of defects into the analysis tools.

Katrina’s presentation focused on a field of engineering I’m almost completely ignorant of: fabric membrane structures. What it really highlighted, however, was the effects of ‘architecture-led-engineering’: Where the resulting structure was completely irrational; requiring each and every double layered panel to be individually analysed and designed. Finally Despina talked us though her involvement with the massive London Bridge Station upgrade project; and the difficulties of managing substantial programme pressures, working with partial information and dealing with the outfall of assumptions, which comes with working on our historic infrastructure!

Discussion Panel

Colin Wilson (GLA), Mark O’Connor (WSP), Clive Atkinson (Mott MacDonald), Karen Cook (PLP Architecture)

Quipping that “London got exciting in the 2000’s”; the view of the panel discussing “Designing the London Skyline” was clearly that the rise of tall-buildings is a good thing. Perhaps more surprising was the discovery that our audience bucked the stereotype of the ‘ordered’ engineer and voted nearly unanimously in favour of the fluid, dynamic and frankly disorganised nature of our city arrangement (that so aptly reflects our historic legal approach to planning) against the more precise ‘zoning‘ found in other cities.

Karen did, however, express a bit of frustration at how slow our system can be; noting that a partial pre-approval approach would be needed to help supply meet demand. The view of the panel was that London is beginning to mature, and the pubescent need for each of our tall buildings to be special (Walkie Talkie, anyone?) is ebbing. City planners are also getting better at negotiating; ensuring that every high-rise either provides affordable accommodation, or contributes to the city as a whole through parks and public infrastructure, etc.

Much of the discussion focused on the life of the buildings (25-50 years for most commercial offices- arguably a waste) and the exclusivity of them; spending our lives designing flats we could never afford. Interestingly Mark noted that this current tendency to mega-tall (40-75 storey) premium high-rises is likely to be a bit of a blip, and that the medium storey towers of the 60s are likely to have a second coming as the city attempts to house its workers.

Michel Virlogeux (Independent)

After last year’s performance by Mike Schlaich, and now Michel’s truly entertaining talk; I’m forced to conclude that engineers on the continent enjoy the profession more than we do! Like other engineering celebrities; I’m never going to do this man justice in a few paragraphs, and I’d really recommend trying to find a talk by him to truly appreciate the experience!

Michel’s talk focused on his experience doing something I’ve said you should never do; making a suspension bridge to carry rail. With the desire to create the slender decks that you would expect from the farther of the Milau Viaduct; Michel won the competition to the new Bosporous Bridge by throwing away the double-decker configuration typically used to provide adequate stiffness, and instead created a cable-stayed/suspension hybrid.

Looking at the 1400m span, Michel quickly identified that the maximum deflections from the heavy combined rail/road loading occurred at the quarter points, and worked to augment the suspension bridge with cable stayed lengths extending out from the pylons; providing enough stiffness while maintaining a razor-thin deck. This system allowed him to find perfect balance in the system under permanent loads; supporting the rest (in his own words) is like finding the cost of VAT!

Mark Whitby (DMagW)

One of the nice things about the Future of Design event are the talks from seasoned engineers who still think that working with structures is fun. Since selling whitbybird back in 2007, Mark, our presidential Olympian (if Wikipedia is to be believed) has set out to take back ownership of our structures, and have fun doing so.

Through a tour-de-force of his more recent projects, Mark has seemingly enjoyed playing with structural forms; although he does acknowledge that architects are needed for the aesthetics (who else knows how to do hand-railing?!) Joking that coming up for new bridge designs is easy, a core theme has been how with working out the detail of every new bridge comes another idea to be investigated and attempted for the next design.

Kirsten Henson (KLH Sustainability)

For Kirsten, the main challenge isn’t the engineering behind making things sustainable; but getting everyone from the clients down to the contractors to buy into the idea. There’s a misnomer that ‘sustainability’ is something you add to the project; an unfortunate set of hoops that you have to jump through, which only makes everything more expensive. Some ways of thinking, however, aren’t helping; and she lamented the difficulties she had using a foam mix for inspection chambers because, despite being around from the 1960’s, it was “unproven”.

The art, according to Kirsten, is learning to use the right language. Clients won’t care that BRE such-and-such states that this should be done, or know a CEEQUAL award if it fell out of a tree onto them; but they will know how having a sustainable building fits in with their core business strategy. Using the new BskyB campus as an example, she explains how KLH engaged with the Corporate Sustainability Team to ensure the sustainability of this major new development was a client-led achievement.

Find the cost saving (think land remediation) and health and safety benefits sustainable technologies can bring, and getting buy-in from a contractor is easy. Designers, she said, have a responsibility to not just hide behind the standards, but to really consider the opportunities around them- to ensure lazy specifications to hinder later sustainability options. She finished by cajoling the room to make sure they tell the public just how good we are- silently working small miracles will get us nowhere!

The next IABSE Future of Design event will be in Manchester on the 27th of March. I’ll be aiming to go (company permitting), and if you can, I’d really recommend you do too- if only for the enviable opportunity to meet myself…

The post The Future of Design 2014: Part 2 appeared first on Being Brunel.

Every year I go to the IABSE Future of Design conference (sample size: 2 years). It has a good selection of speakers, but more than that- it has a good selection of attendees. It’s nice to meet people the same level as me in different firms, who are at least interested in engineering enough to take a day off work to hear about it.

For those of you who know nothing of the IABSE Future of Design events, they’re day long conferences aimed primarily at young designers; although the speakers are typically experienced members of the industry. Unlike many conferences, however, the aim of most talks is simply to celebrate structural design; rather than honing in on a specific technicality- or even field!

As is my wont, this, and the next, post will skim over some of the highlights of the day- for those of you who didn’t attend, and those of you who turned up but were distracted by the pastries.

Josef Hargrave (Arup)

It seems apt that a day on the future of design should begin with someone whose whole career is based on the development of techniques and tools to help target markets for the future. Quipping that ‘change is constant’, and only those that adapt will thrive and survive; Josef outlined his view of the future. At the end of his talk, however, Josef acknowledged that our industry is slow to change because of the relatively long life of our products, and the high risks involved- and he was unsure of what we could do to keep up with the pace of technological and scientific development.

With the widespread accessibility of social media, feedback is immediate and technology allows people to react instantly. According to Josef this will lead to more user driven and democratic design; tooling the communities affected to design their own environment. Engineering will begin to focus more on resilience and adaptation as climate change increases the frequency of extreme events; and similarly resource pressure will lead to a focus on a built environment that produces as much as it consumes. That is Josef’s considered opinion; and to be honest- it’s not hard to imagine it coming to pass…

Francis Archer & Phillip Hall-Patch

Arup & Heatherwick Studio

Not surprisingly Arup’s Garden Bridge was one of the more controversial talks of the event. Crossing the Thames at Embankment, the 300m long, two-span balanced cantilever bridge has been mathematically designed to appear as if it sprouts, like the branches on a tree, from its two piers. The biggest challenge seemed to surround creating a “maintenance free” design life of 120 years for the structure (a phrase I was once told to severely distrust); requiring a monolithic shell of copper-rolled steel. Designed to ‘delight’, I’ll be doing a follow up fairly soon, trying to figure out why this bridge is so divisive.

Julia Barfield (Marks Barfield)

Architect of the London Eye and the Kew Garden tree-top walkway; Julia’s talk was surprisingly modest- although she won me over fairly quickly after stating that “weathering steel is beautiful”. Talking about the Kew Garden tree-top walkway, she explained the focus on keeping the structure a kit of parts; repetitive, slender and adaptable (something that would later help after a last minute route change); and the struggle of getting close enough to a tree without killing it.

Currently she is seeing a project her firm had initiated, the Brighton i360, enter construction. Following the London Eye, she says, every city now seems to want a tourist wheel- but few can really sustain them. The solution for Brighton is a slender needle/capsule vertical lift tower; providing unrivalled views of Brighton, the Channel (and the Isle of Wight, for some reason). Most interesting to me is the construction sequence, which can only be described as a vertical launch- each piece being slotted in at ground level, and then lifted to form a space for the next!

John Cutlack (Flint & Neill)

John started his talk with a reminder that “Structural Engineering is Fun!” He then proceeded to prove it, by taking example of structures he’d been involved with during his career. From floating cars to Venturi chamber shaped bridges, giant model American Footballers [ed. well, I think it was, but Google is showing a blank] that crouched in the wind and climbing walls for land rovers- each example seemed more tantalisingly outlandish than the next.

A common theme across all of the structures he had been involved with was that it was the structure that formed the architecture. Lamenting the separation of architects and engineers that occurred with the industrial revolution, John made a plea for younger engineers to get involved with conceptual design- where there is free reign to think and experiment; too often they get bogged down with detail and then find themselves in management- ultimately missing the chance to have some fun with their skills.

Keith Brownlie (BEaM)

Bridge design, fashion, and innovation formed the crux of Keith’s talk. Starting with the assertion that fashion is circular, technology is linear and construction is stationary (constrained); he asked why don’t bridges all look the same? His answer was context- we have bridges that create context (such as the proposed Garden Bridge) and bridges that engage with the local context (like the Kew Garden walkway). Talking of where the edge-fashion is today for bridges, he identifies ‘logo potential’, view from space (given Google Maps) and turning soffits into areas in their own rights as sources of inspiration.

Ralph Parker & Tim Lucas

Price & Myers

This talk focused on the conceptual birth, engineering development and eventual construction of a sculpture at Heathrow airport. The concept was to build a continuous volume representing the animation of a plane doing an inversion stunt. Tim’s work focused on realising this as a structural system; employing the increasingly necessary engineering skill of big-data management to collate thousands of points down to a real volume; which could then be rationalised into a physical object.

To me, it was the role of the unnamed contractor that proved most interesting. It had turned out that they had cunningly required drawings be provided for all parts. This led the guys to discovered that they had designed something that needed 35’000 drawings to build. That (seemingly alone) is what spurred them to truly address the buildability; reducing the construction complexity into support cassettes, which could be assembled like jigsaws from pieces that were automatically cut using a link between the software and the laser machine- although it still resulted in sections that took three hours to lift…

The post The Future of Design 2014: Part 1 appeared first on Being Brunel.

It’s that time of year again; the annual IABSE Future of Design event is looming. I’ll be going, and you should be coming too. Whilst a lot of industry conferences and events are aimed at the engineers with a good few years under their belt- the IABSE Future of Design event targets young designers. More than anything, this makes for a much more relaxed day- as you’ll be rubbing shoulders with people who have a similar degree of experience, which makes them infinitely easier to strike up a conversation with.

Like Glastonbury (but without the musical camping); the Future of Design 2014 event programme is still shrouded in mystery. A good few speakers have been announced, however, including the engineer behind the Milau Viaduct and a suspiciously large number of people involved with the Garden Bridge that Arup have planned for London. If you want to know what to expect, check out my write up of last year.

Tickets range from £25 to £40 (depending on your rank and company), and this is exactly the sort of the CPD that people working towards chartership should be able to justify to their employer. More than that, it’s a fun day and gives you some perspective on what the rest of the industry is doing.

Click on the button below to find out more, and buy tickets (and no, I don’t get commission).

Buy Your IABSE Future of Design 2014 Ticket

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With 15 speakers, it’s fair to say that ICE Bridges 2014 was a packed event, and, despite dedicating three whole articles to the day, the best I can achieve is this overview of some of the highlights. Unfortunately, with all that dynamic networking, I didn’t manage to get a real look at the stands over the day. At a conference like this, however, it is the speakers who are the heart of the show. If you haven’t already, you can catch-up with the previous two parts here and here respectively.

As we hit the final part of this series, it seems worth finding some Springer’esq final thought to the whole affair. For me the event spoke of how future engineers will focus on maintaining our old infrastructure and working out how to design and build only the most cutting-edge bridges- whilst technology will permeate the construction of new turn-key structures; creating a market for prefabricated off-the-shelf solutions that prefer speed and standardisation over bespoke savings.

Bill Harvey (Bill Harvey Associates)

Like most Twitter fearing Engineers, the thought of accidentally misquoting Dr Harvey is enough to make me put down my scale rule, especially when it was one of the most technical talks of the event, and even more especially considering that he’s already written it up much better in a paper of his own. So, instead, I thought I’d share with you what I learnt from his presentation about replacing the Cleddau Viaduct bearings…

• Make sure you really understand a structure before you start working with it; it was a poorly conceived retro-fitted splice that threatened the viaduct.
• Remember that people will need to access your structures’ components; consider whether you would be able to inspect and replace them…
• Think about what you want to know before you start monitoring- and then think about how your monitoring regime will measure it, in scale, frequency and interval.
• Understand tolerance, especially when crossing between disciplines; mechanical tolerance is easily a factor of 10 away from construction tolerance.

Barry Colford (FETA)

So what does a Bridge Master do? Well, from where I’m standing it seems they spend their days trying to keep their bridge alive. Over the last 50 years the loading across the Forth Road Bridge has reached double the design load, the discovery of cable corrosion predicted that it would collapse in 2014, and now six times the original amount of traffic depends on it. Initially costing £11.5m to build, the cumulative spend on this Forth has reached £275m- a lesson in the importance of designing for durability and ease of maintenance if ever there was one. And whilst dehumidification has been somewhat successful, a replacement is under construction and the bridge seems destined to live out the remaining 70 years of its design life in a crippled state.

The principle challenge to mastering the Forth Road Bridge is that all the key elements are hidden. Whilst acoustic monitoring solutions now exist to ‘listen’ for the sound of breaking cable fibres; they’re only useful if you know how many working cables you have at the start. The cost of unravelling (especially with the risks of working over such a major route) even tiny samples of cable is phenomenal; requiring significant extrapolation and great uncertainties. To make matters worse, the anchorages are grouted underwater with only a rose-tinted ICE paper documenting how successful their installation was.

If it wasn’t for the toll, Colford believes the bridge would never have justified the cost of keeping it maintained for as long as it has been- citing impossible to replace bearings and the struggles of re-painting trusses as even simple design failings that make the structure unmaintainable. He finished by re-iterating his point from the panel: when it comes to maintenance the material cost nothing, the labour cost something, but gaining access costs everything.

Lawrence Shackman (T/port Scotland)

From the old to the new- Lawrence’s talk focused on how ITS’ (Intelligent Transport Systems) have, and will, be used on the replacement Forth Road Crossing. In essence ITS’ are “managed motorways“, a combination of traffic monitoring and feedback that allow critical infrastructure to be controlled, so that it can adapt to situations as they develop. As part of the overall Forth plan they’ll enable the use of hard-shoulder running to maintain public transport reliability, control speed limits to smooth traffic and reduce chain-reaction accidents, and employ the old bridge as a dedicated ‘lighter-loading’ public transport corridor.

Peter Clapham (Unity Partnership)

It’s a little before my time, but in the 1970s it seems there was a vouge for redefining collections of boroughs into pseudo-cities, and then dissolving their responsibilities back to a local level 10 years later; Greater Manchester is an example of this. The Unity Partnership (which is essentially an embryonic LoBEG for the metropolitan county) is an attempt to solve the mismatch that comes from working ‘city’-wide infrastructure issues at individual local levels- a re-centralisation of asset management, if you will.

The Unity in said partnership, however, also includes a public/private partnership with Mouchel. The theory is that the boroughs can collaborate on projects to save money both by sharing project set-up costs, and with additional weight when engaging engineering firms. They can also take a city-wide view of asset maintenance; more easily realising the responsibilities that engineers have to their ageing infrastructure, despite 30% budget cuts. According to Peter, it seems to be working…

Campbell Middleton (Cambridge Uni.)

Starting with the fairly brave assertion that we haven’t really changed the way we design and build bridges over the last 50 years, Campbell’s talk focused on areas where technology may innovate our structures in the not-to-distant future. Of interest to HS2 must have been the Explore Industrial Park (EIP), which is spearheading the Accelerated Bridge Construction approach already used in America to turn our ‘standard’ bridges into off-the-shelf products for clients to buy and assemble. He also made a call for a more encompassing BIM standard to store more esoteric measures such as residual life and serviceability.

Perhaps his most exciting points (the more standard promises of new materials and analysis techniques aside) surrounded developments in monitoring; the use of fibre optics to get real-time information about how structures are behaving, employing wireless sensor networks to easily share this information, the advent of micro-electromechanical systems to make monitoring more affordable and computer vision to make all the data useful. His examples included bridges where the monitoring showed none of the piles where being utilised, and Augmented Reality tools where videos were seamlessly converted into 3D models.

My favourite part, and a good note to end this series on, was his Holy Grails of engineering problems that, despite all these new innovations, we still haven’t solved:

• We can’t accurately calculate the ultimate shear capacity of concrete.
• We can’t reliably locate where reinforcement has been placed in complex sections.
• We can’t detect how much steel in concrete has corroded.
• We can’t monitor fatigue in steel.
• We can’t measure the true strength of our materials.

Here’s to the future…

The post ICE Bridges 2014: Part Three appeared first on Being Brunel.

Welcome back to ICE Bridges 2014: Catching Fire. If you didn’t read the first part, this is the second in a trilogy chronicling the speaker highlights from the bridge event of the year [citation needed]. Through a full day of fourteen talks from key industry figures and a panel discussion, ICE Bridges 2014 not only revealed the future of design/construction technology, but the mounting responsibility engineers have to the ever growing collection of ageing bridge assets across the country.

As today is also National Women in Engineering Day, an aside about the gender distribution seems apt. Taken as an overall view, there was one female speaker, and only about 10% of the delegates were women. Whilst this isn’t fantastic, it was somewhat encouraging to note that the balance was significantly improved if you considered only the attendees under the age of 30. Assuming the industry gets better at retention, and with the wonderful work of campaigns such as Your Life, it’s not impossible to imagine that ICE Bridges 2034 will have a much more equal gender landscape.

Tomás García (HS2 Ltd)

Frankly I’m amazed it took until the fifth speaker before our industry’s TLA silver-bullet got a mention. HS2 is all about the bridges and the BIM; and with 135 over-bridges, 185 under-bridges and 30km of viaducts required along the preliminary route, it’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t be. The HS2 Ltd. motto, it seems, is to challenge every convention within the industry to find greater efficiency; asking why we can’t design the track alignment/furniture and the structures at the same time and even re-authoring the Eurocodes. With this relentless exploration they have been playing with a 50km long sample model to emulate and identify problems (and opportunities), hopefully, before they arise.

What is most interesting is their desire to reduce the hundreds of structures down to a small number of parametric families. These digital design models would be holistically designed, so that they could be literally ‘dropped’ into place, and then manipulated within certain bounds to fit the local environment. The process is not entirely new, with off-the-shelf bridges being a staple in America and Network Rail including a library of bridge designs in their standard details. Whether or not current technology is up to this next iteration, however, is something I’m cautiously optimistic about.

Andy Cooke (WSP)

Despite sounding like an advert for Tekla, Andy’s talk about the successes WSP have achieved through embracing 3D modelling was nevertheless impressive. Expressing frustration with how the UK’s reluctance to move from the ‘2D paper drawings’ mindset is holding us back, when compared to the progress our Scandinavian colleagues have made embracing 3D delivery technologies; he walked us though successes WSP have had with Tekla. He is also the first engineer I’ve met who has some experience with IFC and the extent to which it does and does not work.

Although I had always though ‘but why would you want to do that’ when hearing someone announce that you could draw 3D concrete geometries with all the reinforcement fully modelled within it; Andy’s demonstration showed how the (modest) increase in draughting time has paid dividends with clash detection that resulted in zero site queries, and automatic schedule generation in digital exchange formats that could then be passed directly to the fabricators. He also talked about the advantages of being able to handle complex geometry and how 3D models were more universally accessible for both client and contractor comments.

Paul Monaghan (LoBEG)

For all of you who aren’t in the know, LoBEG is the London Bridge Engineering Group, which collects together all the bridge owners (i.e. the 33 boroughs and TfL) to advise and manage how they assess and maintain their structures (which, worryingly, they are still finding). Their work includes collating bridge condition information in their bespoke Bridge Station software, and providing asset management tool-kits to councils (some of which share, or don’t even have, dedicated bridge engineers). His key point to engineers was that we have to understand maintenance procedures and make our structures more maintainable; despite being forever hailed for its design, it takes eight people to change a light bulb on the Millennium Bridge…

Panel: Designing For Maintenance

Mike Chrimes (ICE), Barry Colford (FETA), Martin Knight (Knight Architects), Tim Kersley (Network Rail), Tomás García (HS2 Ltd)

Looking back at my notes, it’s clear the panel discussion was a confused affair. But perhaps that reflects the state of the profession when it comes to designing for maintenance (and indeed, as the topic quickly swung to: Maintaining our ageing assets). The traditional problems were wheeled out: inspectors are incredibly important, but there’s not enough experienced engineers doing it, and there’s not enough money to retain and attract more. On the topic of designing for maintenance, this lack of experience was also blamed for why we’re so bad at it, there is no one ‘right’ material for durability, and that FRP will be useful when we work out how to design it without pretending it’s steel.

Discussing maintenance did, however, reveal a few more intriguing points. Firstly our habit of targeting only damaged assets means that the ‘mode‘ group is steadily declining, and in the non-too-distant future there will be a significant spike in the number of structures that are in desperate need of maintenance. Whilst technology might help, cost and access (lit. signal) barriers have prevented its adoption. One suggestion was to copy the Japanese model of ring-fencing governmental money for maintenance, removing the constant temptation to defer action. Perhaps most interesting was learning that access requirements form the most substantial portion of assessment and maintenance work costs; so perhaps this is what we, as designers, should focus on.

Martin Knight (Knight Architects)

This isn’t the first time I have heard Martin talk about his work on the Te Matau a Phoe bridge. Following on from my initial impressions at the Future of Design 2013 event, Martin’s talk discussed the idea of integral architecture- that (especially on publicly funded infrastructure projects) the contribution he made had to be one that could not be removed. Most important, I believe, was his closing message; that engineers (and architects) must understand that our structures will easily out live us, and so we must design for the people who come after.

Still interested? Take a look at the final part of the ICE Bridge 2013 highlights.

The post ICE Bridges 2014: Part Two appeared first on Being Brunel.

Just over a week ago I was lucky enough to be invited to the ICE Bridges 2014 conference, which brought together some of the most prominent bridge engineers across the UK. Held in the awe-inspiring headquarters of the institution, the event had a packed program of seminars that took in everything from maintenance of our historic bridges, through to the future technologies that will shape design.

Chaired by Mike Chrimes, the talks were interspersed by opportunities to network, eat food from plates with integrated glass-holders, and take in the exhibition stalls presented by the multitude of sponsors. Before embarking on this three parter sharing the highlights of each talk, I think it’s worth mentioning that ICE Bridges 2014 was the last event that Mike (who’s 37 years at the institution included the digitisation of the ICE Library) would chair before retirement.

Roger Ridsdill-Smith (Foster + Partners)

Famous for his involvement with the Millennium Bridge, I’d already seen Roger deliver a project talk for the IABSE. Interestingly, however, this lecture focused on introducing his philosophy of ‘inevitable design’: Design that is invisible; so obvious that it’s not even clear it was a decision. To establish his point, Roger used a picture of a park path. While the actual path took a scenic curve, there was a clear beaten track of dead grass along the shortest, straight, route. The foot-forged straight was the inevitable design, and by ignoring it the landscaper had created a redundant path.

When it comes to bridges, Roger sees the inevitable design as the alignment created by constraints. The Millennium Bridge had to keep shipping channels and the Southbank path open, and maintain the views of St Pauls. The famous cathedral also has a straight route along Peter’s Hill to the Thames. This creates an inevitable axis for the bridge with an inevitable alignment formed along the the river clearance, and an inevitable low-profile form. Arguably it was the constraints (or the inevitabilities) that created the solution (sounds like my definition of Elegant Design?).

Steve Nicholson (Mersey Gateway)

As an engineer, especially a younger one, it’s easy to start thinking of bridges as things that will get built and need to be designed. That’s why, to me, Steve’s talk was so interesting, as it focused on his work getting the new Mersey Gateway Crossing to the stage where it will actually get built, and needs to be designed. Located at a point where everyone agrees the infrastructure is already at capacity, but no one public group thought it strategic enough to take ownership; Steve has seen the scheme picked up by Halton Council, working to find private funding and political acceptance.

Getting a bridge to the stage that it will actually get built appears to be an exercise in balance. You start with the relatively easy prospect of getting a road to cross a river, but then to justify the scheme to government it suddenly needs to do more than elevate traffic; and you find yourself adding second stories of public transport corridors and redeveloping the whole area. Then to get permission from the public you need to do everything you can to alleviate the impact on the environment, regardless of the cost- which ironically is the only thing the private investors you have to convince to pay for the structure care about. At the last, you’ve gambled 5 years and £40 million just to find out if you’ll be allowed to build the damn thing.

Steve attributes a failure to maintain this balance as the reason many schemes are never realised– the scope creeps beyond recovery and the cost escalates beyond that private investors could ever justify a return from, or agree a maintenance period for. But it is also this attitude that means that the new bridge will come at a cost of tolling (investors want tangible gain, not just the warm glow that comes from making the world a better place), and be formed from a conservative foundation; with contractors focusing on the familiar to afford the aggressive approaches to risk necessitated by the value engineering that comes from the continuous scrutiny of stakeholders.

Mariapia Angelino (Bristol University)

Love ’em or hate ’em, the Eurocodes are here to stay. As the suite was conceived in 1975, however, it’s hard to think of them as anything other than holy writ, handed down from mysterious standards committees, that the forever put-upon engineer just has to cope with. But did you know that in 2013 a mandate was issued to begin writing the next generation of the Eurocodes, which, unlike their parents, will be available in six years time? That’s why Mariapia’s talk has me excited (in fact, this subject will be getting its own post…); here is a chance to influence the codes we’ll be using to design Crossrail 3…

So what can we expect from the Eurocodes and the Chamber of Secrets? Well, despite difficulties harmonising product standards across Europe, there’s a plan to extend beyond Europe, with work being undertaken to engage India, China, Africa and South America. On a more tangible note, Glass and FRP are being added to the material suite, with membrane forms being included alongside requirements for robustness and measuring climate change impact. Interestingly, the next generation of Eurocodes won’t just be for new structures, but will include methods of assessment for working with repairs and retro-fitting. Perhaps most exciting is that a key focus will be on addressing the most common complaint about them: they’re going to be easier to use!

Keith Ross (Network Rail)

After a talk from the “King of Bridge Strikes”, I expect you, too, will pause to consider if there is more you could do than just make a note of it on the risk assessment and chuck in a requirement for some signage. Frankly, the statistics are alarming: there were 1645 strikes (that’s just over 30 a week) to rail-over-road bridges alone in 2013, 443 of which were in Surrey, with the majority HGVs into 13′ and 14’6” clearances.

Depressingly, however, a study into why bridges are hit so often turned out that 32% of drivers didn’t know the height of their vehicle, 22% had planned their route badly (and, presumably, therefore decided just to go for it), and 8% of drivers simply didn’t believe the signs. Whilst this suggests that engineers are therefore powerless to stop them; Keith believes that we could do a lot to improve our signage, claiming that he’s yet to see a compliant set on any bridge. Pointing to the latest issue of “Prevention of Strikes on Bridges Over Highways“, he cites arches that force drivers into the middle of busy roads, obscured signs and lack of clear diversions as engineering failings which we must address.

Fernando Sarasa (Structural Reserach)

Fernando’s main achievement was to introduce me to the BSST (Bridges/Beams Spliced with Short Tendons) system that the Spanish have been extensively using for the last 20 years. Without spamming you with technical details, the BSST System is essentially a collection of precast pre/post-tensioned concrete elements that are placed together and then jointed (using minimal in-situ concrete) to form a structural member.

As well as gaining the inherent benefits of factory-quality pre-casting, the system creates a bridge that can be delivered and placed from the back of a lorry, and is configured in such a way that the elements form working platforms from which the the in-situ jointing between segments and thin top slab can be poured. This leads to 150m long bridges that can be read for service in 9 weeks; what more need be said?

Check-out Part 2 of the ICE Bridges 2014 highlights.

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