49115 Facade Engineering
Assignment 3 (Design Strategies)
10% of subject assessment
BACKGROUND
You are a graduate structural engineer (congratulations ! ), and the consulting firm that you
are employed by has a good client that happens to operate a brewery.
The brewery site contains an old brick building, built around 1900, which is shown below:
This building is in the way of a new proposed truck pickup/loading dock. To overcome this
obstacle it is proposed to construct a new portal through the external walls of the building to
allow the trucks to drive under the building.
To complicate things further, a new electrical substation needs to be installed in the building
as well, next to the truck portal. As a result almost the entire bottom of the building will need
to be underpinned.
The external wall is loadbearing brickwork, 350mm thick at the top, gradually becoming
thicker down the wall (to carry the increasing load). At the bottom the wall is 820mm thick.
The support structure for the new portals must be within the building footprint, as the front of
the building is a public footpath.
Substation
Opening
Truck
OpeningYour Director has come up with the following underpinning scheme:
Framing Scheme (per portal)
Framing Scheme (cross section)
In effect, a steel portal is to be built inside the wall, then holes are to be punched through the
walls to allow steel needles to be installed.
The flat jacks above each needle are then to be loaded to the equivalent load of the
supported brickwork and floors above, to preload the steelwork so that it does not suddenly
deflect during the demolition process.
After the jacking is complete the brick wall is to be demolished to create the new entries, and
the steelwork is all concrete encased.
Hydraulic Flat JackTHE REVIEW
You have now carried out the structural calculations and sketches for this simple (but very
heavy duty) underpinning scheme.
However you are concerned that, given the loads involved, there is a serious risk of
injury/death if something goes wrong.
You go to your Director and ask for a review of your design, to check if you got it right.
Your Director looks at your work and says that you are far from finished !
He says that you need to consider the “big picture” and identify all the steps that need to be
carried out to “get it right” (i.e. a successful underpinning project). Then he will look at it (if he
has time).
ASSIGNMENT
Your assignment is to summarise the key tasks that you will put in place to “get it right”
during the:
- Design/Documentation Phase;
- Fabrication Phase; and
- Construction Phase.
NOTE:
This is NOT a calculation assignment. Your task is to identify the checks and precautions
that you will undertake during each phase to ensure that the underpinning work is
successful, and you do not end up with the wall collapsed in the street !
In simple terms you need to identify what you will do during each phase (Design,
Fabrication, and Construction) to ensure you “get it right”.
The picture below is the underpinning work nearing completion. The workers finishing off the
demolition work will go home to their families that night safe and sound, because they know
that the structural engineer (YOU) know what you are doing and that you “got it right”.Assignment Specific Requirements
This is an individual assignment (no groups). The assignment is to be 2 pages maximum.
Under the headings of Design/Documentation, Fabrication, and Construction you are to
present (in bullet point form) the tasks that you believe should be undertaken, why they
should be undertaken, and how you will communicate those tasks to key stakeholders.
For guidance, you should be able to identify at least 4 tasks under each heading, and if you
think hard about it you might get up to 8 to 10 tasks under some of the headings.
You are free to talk to each other, to other lecturers, and to co-workers to help you form your
views. You can email any queries to me.
WARNING: If you hand in an assignment that starts talking about how important it is to have
a safe design, or start writing about safety in design principles, then I will give you zero (0)
as a mark.
This is assignment is not about how many useless “motherhood statements” you can quote
from Google. This assignment is about identifying the specific tasks that you will carry out to
make sure that your design does not kill someone.
Submission
Assignments are to be submitted to me by email, by no later than the start of the lecture on
the 2nd of June. I will send a reply email to acknowledge receipt of each submission.
Assignments submitted after 6pm will not be accepted. During the beginning of that lecture I
will go through the answers.
Finally, if you want to have a look at the final construction for inspiration, it is 5 min walk
away (across the road at the old brewery site):