About the company
Founded in 1987 by Thomas Jundt, civil engineer EPF-SIA, the engineering office shows in the last 10 years an important growth.
With 20 specialists, the team offers civil engineering and project management services. The company culture is one of a constant pursuit of innovative and rational solutions, both for the owner and contractor.
The team is currently working on several projects (halls, residential complexes, villas, industrial buildings, …) among which a major undertaking is the new building of the cantonal hospital (240 Mio CHF).

About the project
The need for a link between the existing building and the new extension resulted in the construction of this footbridge, with a length of about 100m. While the lower level is closed and dedicated to pedestrians and an automatic robot, the upper level is reserved for transfer of fluids.

There is thus not much space available for the steel structure. The structure is partially cable-stayed to decrease the footprint on the ground. Safety exits required that several bracing diagonals had to be removed, making the structure sensitive to torsion.

The applied loads are rather important: service loads of 3 tons/m' and a mobile load of 3.5 tons, asymmetrical loads due to the pipes, a class II building in a seismic zone (Z2) giving a horizontal acceleration of about 20% of g, significant wind loads and finally large temperature differences.

In Scia Engineer, the complete 3D model of concrete and steel includes also the deck, through which the horizontal forces are transmitted. "Absences" were used to take into account the erection, shoring, etc. The seismic response was assessed thanks to a dynamic analysis. Initial stresses were applied to put the cables in tension. Finally, a large number of asymmetrical variable load cases as well as temperature load cases were applied.

Read the whole article (pdf).

Since Scia Engineer 2011.0 the user has the possibility to influence the Local Co-ordinate System (LCS) of 2D member mesh elements. By default, the results on 2D members are calculated according to the LCS of the mesh elements. This means that the user now has a powerful means to obtain the required display of results.

Until now the local axes of the mesh elements were always automatically generated and the user could interact only by swapping the local z-axis direction. What is new is that the user can choose between several options for the property 'LCS Type' for any 2D member (both plane and curved), see image 1.

image 1	image 2	image 3	image 4

An important use case is the design of reinforcement in a circular (flat) slab. Image 2 shows two methods for the definition of the LCS.

For the slab on the left, the standard method is chosen, which results in a Cartesian LCS orientation. Although for circular slabs, a polar LCS orientation is more logical. This can now be obtained e.g. by means of the settings (see the slab on the right) in image 3.

The local y-axis of each mesh element is directed towards the point with co-ordinates (20;0;0), which is the midpoint of the slab.

In the Concrete menu of Scia Engineer, the user can now execute the reinforcement design according to the user defined LCS of the mesh elements, see image 4.

For the 1st slab this results in a standard orthogonal reinforcement mesh, while for the 2nd slab a radial and tangential reinforcement configuration is obtained.

TIP: Keep in mind that by default, the reinforcement direction 1 coincides with the local x-axis of the mesh elements and direction 2 with the local y-axis.