JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #134 - May/June 2020 - 44

FEATURE building & construction

The Dubai Future Museum

the trend towards life cycle management.
It is also useful for small projects, but the
initial investment and the need to train
staff are slowing down its use by design
studios and small businesses. However,
it is expected that by 2025, BIM will be
advanced enough in the B&C sector to
generate productivity gains of 15 to 25%.
Currently, the sector's companies can be
divided into two groups. In the "traditional" one, the companies carry out the
basic design work for a project using 3D
CAD software while, for more advanced
companies, the use of BIM allows to
integrate everyone's work by bringing together real-time skills to solve problems
in collaborative hubs that can include the
users and owners of a structure.
Transforming the
construction sector
By promoting full collaboration, BIM
will transform the construction sector.
The projects include precise sequencing
so that everyone knows what materials
must arrive on the site and when and
how they will enter the structure. Design,
production and logistics are closely
integrated with real construction. BIM
can be further expanded to include cost
dimensions, sustainability and facility

management.
For example, the new Dubai Future
Museum adopted an innovative approach
and is considered one of the most complex projects ever. Performed entirely
with a parametric approach and developed thanks to thousands of data and
variables, it is so complex that it would
have been impossible to design without
BIM. The museum exterior, perfectly
smooth and without joints, is made up of
890 stainless steel and GFRP panels. Even
the interior, designed without pillars,
posed several challenges, including the
design of a self-supporting double-helix
staircase that was created through BIM.
Designed by Killa Design and
BuroHappold Engineering and commissioned by the Dubai Future Foundation,
the museum occupies an area of
30,000 m² and is currently under construction by BAM International. It is
expected to open to the public during the
World Expo in October 2020.
BIM and seismic design in Italy
In Italy, BIM is widely used by civil engineers and architects to design structures
and infrastructures. However, geological
and geotechnical data are not used at all in
the BIM design process, despite the fact

jec composites magazine / N°134 May - June 2020

that, on a large part of the Italian territory,
most of the risks and uncertainties of a
construction derive from the characteristic of a seismic risk territory. Recently, an
application of the BIM design process in
geotechnical engineering was presented
by the University of Naples Federico II,
through the case study of the Sant'Agata
de'Goti historic centre in southern Italy.
The data from the numerous boreholes
drilled on site was imported into the BIM
software to create the interfaces between
the soil layers and the 3D geometry of
the entire hill. The advantages of geotechnical design in the BIM process were
highlighted, including model accuracy,
easy retrieval and management of complex information and interoperability
between the software used in the various
design phases.
The cost and time saving benefits were
developed to optimize digital models
and improve interoperability between
the different skills involved in the design
process and its realization, due to the reduction of unforeseen problems and the
easier updating of the digital model. At
the same time, slower progress has been
made in recent years in the application of
the BIM process in the geotechnical field,
although many civil engineering problems arise from unknown soil conditions.
Only a few examples of geotechnical
constructions were designed adopting a
BIM-based approach and, in most cases,
they consisted in archiving and updating
geological and geotechnical data. Of
course, data sharing is the core of BIM,
but it is possible to take advantage of
multiple aspects of the geotechnical field.
It was shown that the BIM approach to
the entire design process is possible and
the advantages of modelling the complex
geometry of the hill and its layered
terrain, as well as interoperability with
adopted 2D and 3D numerical software,
were highlighted.
Building Information Modelling (BIM) is
becoming an important civil engineering
project approach for infrastructure, construction, operational and process management. Most often, many structure and
infrastructure projects with significant
geotechnical aspects seem overlooked in

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #134 - May/June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #134 - May/June 2020