Nemetschek Scia Company News

Shells of the Rolex Learning Center by BG Ingénieurs Conseils (CH)

About BG Ingénieurs Conseils The BG group is a firm of consulting engineers operating at an international level and whose objective is to help their clients to build a sustainable living environment. United around strong corporate values, BG’s staff represent a remarkable collective intelligence able to provide simple answers to the complex issues that arise from our planet’s development.

It provides extensive services in the fields of infrastructure, environment as well as building and energy. BG’s excellence is renowned in developing complex and challenging multidisciplinary projects, where its in-house competence in project management, risk assessment and optimum use of resources is a decisive factor.

About the Project

With this project, BG Ingénieurs Conseils won the Nemetschek Engineering User Contest 2009 in category 5, CAE Special Projects.
The Rolex Learning Centre is a new prestigious building of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), designed by the Japanese architect office SANAA.
The main characteristic of this 160m x 120m structure is that the floor of the building follows the convex shape of the two shells of the project. It is aesthetically really breathtaking.

The main challenge of the project was the dimensioning of the extremely slender reinforced concrete shells. Their shape is very irregular, including many large patios.
Many complex non-linear calculations were carried out with Scia Engineer using a full 3D model: large displacements and 2nd order effects, critical instability modes, construction stages, prestressing and time effects, dynamics and seismic analysis, and, last but not least, stripping by jacks.

The Rolex learning Centre is a facility that blends into the landscape.

A quote from the Jury:
"An assembly of complex thin concrete shells providing a visually impressive functional arrangement requiring careful analysis at all stages during the construction. Scia Engineer was used for non-linear and dynamic analysis as well as to simulate the removal of formwork struts. The result is a facility that blends into the landscape.”

Read more about this project, browse through our online eBook or order your free copy of the Nemetschek Engineering User Contest 2009 Book.

Scia Engineer Tips & Tricks: Freezing of pictures in the Document

The compounding and regeneration of the Document in Scia Engineer can take up a lot of time, especially when dealing with large documents containing many pictures. A new feature in Scia Engineer 2010.0 – the ‘freezing of pictures’ – can save a significant amount of time. This is done by (temporarily) breaking the intelligent link between the pictures and the model. An extra property, ‘frozen’, has now been assigned to each picture in the Document. The activation of this property means that the picture is stored in the cache, so it will no longer be regenerated with the rest of the Document. This means that any modification of the model is no longer automatically transferred to the picture. To avoid mistakes a warning is shown on top of every picture which might be outdated. When the Document is ready to be printed, the property ‘frozen’ can be once more deselected. The intelligent link with the model is then restored, and after a clicking the ‘Refresh Pictures’ icon, all pictures will be updated.

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