The project expands an existing plasterboard factory by adding nine new buildings.
These buildings will serve different technological purposes, from raw material processing to waste storage. From a technological standpoint, the mill building is responsible for the production process, and consists of a multi-story rigid frame steel structure.
Although the geometry of the building can be interpreted as a classical shape, which does not necessarily require parametric design, our goal was to parameterize it and keep all the data in one place during the design of the project by building a central BIM model. The central model managed the entire design process from the Rhino-Grasshopper interface.
Being an industrial building, where technology is the main priority, we built the geometry based on the general loading data coming from the equipment . This process resulted in a 3D structural model composed of beam frame elements. In the next step, this model has been analyzed using Consteel structural design software.
Focusing on the benefits of Pangolin’s flexible compatibility aspects, we could update and synchronize our central model with the optimized structure in Consteel.
After this, we performed the joint design using the Grasshopper-Idea Statica contact. In this way, we filtered typical joints (e.g., column-splicing, column-main beam), which were dimensioned to the automatically extracted internal forces from the Consteel model. These forces were the maximum simultaneous, as well as the absolute maximum values for all positions of the selected joint. These final connections were spread over all positions using predefined Tekla macros using Grasshopper. Thus, it was possible to automatically position 2074 joints of the strut beams with a single click. Using this method, more than 3800 Tekla macros were spread using the Grasshopper code.
Thanks to this process, we have gained 40-60% of the joint sizing and modeling time.
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