TheStructuralEngineer.info attends Bentley’s 2024 Year in Infrastructure Structural Engineering Finalists’ Presentations Featured

TheStructuralEngineer.info’s team attended Bentley’s 2024 Year in Infrastructure & Going Digital Awards that took place in Vancouver, Canada, on the 8^th and 9^th of October.

Furthermore, three project finalists presented their work in the Structural Engineering category.

The first project was “Advanced Analysis and Design of Flood Protection Structures Through Automation” and was carried out by Arcadis.

Arcadis is currently involved in several flood management projects, while their number is expected to increase in the future due to climate change and sea level rise.

Such projects require the design of several flood gate and flood wall structures, which is a rather time-consuming process. Characteristically, in the last 2 years, the team designed 20 flood gates and 25 flood walls for three different projects, which took about 1,000 hours and 25% of that time was applying structural loads alone.

Hence, it became clear that design automation was much needed. This was done in three steps, utilizing Excel for data input, and then OpenSTAAD and STAAD.Pro for the automatic creation of the model.

The second project was “Enhancing Urban Connectivity–The Punjabi Bagh Interchange”, which was undertaken by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation Limited.

The scope of this project was to improve connectivity along Delhi’s metro line through the construction of the Punjabi Bagh West, which will connect Line 5 and Line 7 between the Inderlok-Mundka and Shiv Vihar-Majlis Park respectively.

This project faced several challenges, including a 19-meter difference between rail and ground level, constant heavy traffic, and tight schedules.

These challenges were addressed through the development of 3D models and a digital twin, by using Bentley’s OpenBridge, STAAD, and RAM, which provided the agility and rapidity that were needed.

This approach significantly improved efficiency by 20%, reduced cost, and resulted in saving 12% to 16% in concrete materials and 350 megatons of steel, which also reduced carbon emissions.

The third, and winning, project was “New Physical Modeling Method for Plant Steel Structures Using STAAD API” by Hyundai Engineering.

Hyundai took into consideration the vast amount of time spent on repetitive modeling tasks regarding the design of plant steel structures, as well as how the current process is prone to errors.

Hence, they realized that there is a need for the creation of a new modeling method, which ideally had to utilize automation.

This is why the company developed a third-party program for plant steel design automation.

Their in-house automation program was used in Bentley’s STAAD and was tested in a sample project, where it showed a 70% reduction in design time and a 50% error reduction, while also reducing material volumes, cost and, subsequently, carbon emissions.