Forming the way in design
WHEN Perth Engineering Firm ETTOL was engaged by Vale Steel Fabricators to design a concrete mould for three off-bridge piers for the Armadale Road Upgrade Project, its principal engineer Kyaw Thu said it drew inspiration from previous design experience in the mining industry whilst leveraging new technology to deliver the goods.
“We used cutting edge technology combined with solid experience in project implementation to provide an innovative time and cost-effective solution for the project,” he said.
“To minimise time and cost, we steered away from traditional formwork and developed formwork using a plated steel structure to be implemented over three piers.”
ETTOL also leveraged Finite Element Design using a steel mould approach to accurately predict the deflections and stresses more accurately, which allowed the 3mm deflection limit applied by the PTA.
“This type of analysis is not usually applied in the formwork industry as they still (mostly) use long hand approaches,” Mr Thu said.
“However, we identified that the high-end ANSYS software by Finite Element was applicable to this particular structure.
“The bi-directional compatibility between Spaceclaim and Mechanical allowed us to do several iterations in very short time frame and the stresses and deflections were able to be predicted more accurately.”
The detailed stress analysis was conducted to design exact length of welds needed to save fabrication cost whilst maintaining adequate strength.
In addition, the form deflection was predicted at a maximum of 3mm and was actually measured to be only 1mm, which was well inside the PTA specifications. ETTOL successfully leveraged the right tools combined with its vast knowledge to deliver a high-end design that was both time and cost effective.