Monday 12 October 2009

Infinity Bridge - Supreme Award for Structural Engineering Excellence




We're so thrilled at Expedition, for structural engineering this award excels amongst the best for peer recognition for design excellence.  Infinity Bridge won the 2009 IStructE Supreme Award for Structural Engineering Excellence, to crown it's recognition as the 2009 IStructE Award for Pedestrian Bridges.

Infinity Bridge was competing against over 100 global entries in 11 categories from stadia to public buildings to bridges to private houses.

And this project is a supreme example of the Structural Drawing Tools being developed for Rhino.  The arches of the bridge were form found to minimize flexural stress whilst the bridge is free standing, so no pure mathematical curves define the girder set out.  Setting out this structure in traditional 2d methods would have been painstaking and inefficient.  Current 3d structure modelling software appeared to lack key features to easily generate and manipulate this free flowing curved structure.  So we innovated and generated our own tools for our Rhino3D model, that was the principal means of defining the key bridge geometry (which tapered along it's length as well as in section).

Effectively an early version of the current plug-ins, we created tools where a primary spreadsheet generated model creation for both Rhino and Structural Analysis in GSA, ensuring coordination between assessment model and documented structure model.

Thursday 1 October 2009

Extruding along Rhino Curves



A question raised on the Grasshopper forum for examples/instructions for extruding structural profiles along grasshopper curves prompted me to post a screen capture to you-tube demonstrating the capabilities of the Structural Drawing plug-in.

I thought I'd post the hypar grasshopper file here for those wishing to test it for themselves.

Note that it demonstrates how properties can now be assigned to layers, and that any curve added or modified on that layer will have an updated sweep. For some reason the event watcher doesn't presently identify when the grasshopper bake command finishes, hopefully I'll have this resolved soon.