The Year in Infrastructure 2007 - (Page 18) Bim fOr Building engineering This category applies to creative and effective uses of information-based approaches in the engineering process. Of particular interest are projects in which BIM was used to analyze and design the engineering system and enabled a design or project approach or specific benefits. winner BioMed Engineering and Optics Laboratory Building m/e engineering, p.c. The Biomedical Engineering and Optics building at the University of Rochester is a 95,000 squarefoot teaching/research facility. The five-story structure includes laboratories, offices, and lecture halls surrounding an atrium. Its design incorporated a green building methodology for laboratories to enhance performance and efficiency. BIM enabled the complete coordination and redesign of a spacechallenged mechanical penthouse with a curved roof structure. Waste heat from a campus cogeneration plant is the sole heat source for the building. The central atrium required a smoke exhaust feature that greatly increased the complexity of the system. The 3D building models were imported directly into computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to analyze airflow, smoke density, and temperature during a simulated atrium fire. This provided considerable time savings by eliminating the need to recreate the building design in the CFD software. The laboratories and support spaces are served with separate variable-volume supply and exhaust systems based on use of space. Mechanical systems are housed in the restricted confines of a penthouse with a curved roof structure. The penthouse is a prominent design feature of the building, and its shape — and the space available for the mechanical systems — changed many times during the design process. Each design change entailed a corresponding redesign of the mechanical systems, a task performed quickly and efficiently using 3D modeling. The design team also created a large number of section and isometric views from the 3D models to show contractors how to install the mechanical systems. The design team used MicroStation for the modeling of spaces and mechanical systems. The 3D PDFs generated were shared with other team members and contractors for coordination and production of shop drawings. Bentley Building Mechanical Systems was used to model the atrium and its associated mechanical systems. Bentley’s BIM solutions saved countless hours and greatly improved the documents created. 18 ThE YEAR IN INFRASTRUCTURE 2007
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