SMART Modeller EPW Tackles Large Space for Airplane Maintenance

Hamonterweg 103
3930 Hamont-Achel
Belgium

Tel.: +32 11 64.07.51
Fax: +32 11 64.87.95
Email:
Contact: M. Ronny Loos
Email:
Website: www.csm.be

Airplane Maintenance Workshop

This project is part of the extension of the airport activities at Toulouse (Fr). It concerns a maintenance workshop for different types of airplanes. In order to be capable of storing large aircrafts, huge column-free dimensions were required for this project.  This hall consists of 2 main spans of 95 metres and a depth of 59 metres. At the front site huge wheeled door panels are provided to achieve the best possible accessibility for the airplanes. In order to improve the working conditions at the ground floor, sufficient sunlight has to enter the hall and for this reason the roof is provided with large "shed-roofs". Furthermore, to improve the architectonical elegancy, the roofs have been curved.  As this project will be a maintenance workshop, a considerable number of cranes is integrated in the roof structure as well as other technical equipment.

The Structure was Built as Follows

• Curved purlins supported by roof trusses
• Roof trusses are supported by primary trusses
• The primary trusses are supported on columns at the back site and at the front site a huge spaced truss is provided. The bottom chord of these trusses are also equipped with crane way girders.
• The huge spaced truss (depth 8 m / width 8 m) spans 2 x 95 m and is build up of circular hollow sections. These trusses have been assembled and welded at ground level and afterwards lifted and erected as one big unit with a length of 95 m.
• A stable structure is created after adding bracings at the roof and the walls.

Given the complex interaction between the different building components and on explicit request of the client, the "complete" structure has been modelled in a "3D-frame"-model. The final model has up to 3910 nodes and 8690 bars.

During erection, each major truss of 95 m is simply supported on 2 columns. Later on, the top chords of these trusses are welded on site as to create a continues truss of 190 m. This simply supported situation has been modelled using the option "absence" for this particular load case.

On customers' demand, a "differential" settlement of the column bases was taken into account. The wind loads have been determined taking into account the different positions of the wheeled door panels. All load cases were combined according to the combination rules described in CM66 (French standard), which resulted in approximately 60.000 load combinations.
Verifying and optimising all bars for all 60.000 combinations is a very time-consuming job. This problem was resolved by storing only "the envelope internal forces". This action resulted in a "workable" amount of results, which empowered us to recalculate and optimise the project within a reasonable time period.

While creating calculation notes we encountered another problem. For this project it is quite easy to create a vast amount of paper output with input data and results. Although this would have been the easiest for us to do, we decided to hand over a demo-version of ESA-Prima Win to the controlling parties as well as a project file which included the calculated results. By consequence, the input data and the results were much more synoptic to them.

Project Characteristics
2100 ton
26000 m²
Chantier Air France
31700 Blagnac-Toulouse