Nemetschek Engineering User Contest 2009 • Category 2: CAE Housing & Buildings 59 2 As the building can accommodate 2000 students this is a relatively highly serviced building. This required the introduction of a 50 tonne water tank within the second floor plant room. The first floor nightclub needed to be a column free space. Additionally there is an acoustic requirement to limit the noise leakage from the building which is achieved by a 160 mm thick RC composite slab. To support the roof slab twelve 24 m long Westok cellular beams, spaced at 3 m centres, were provided over the main auditorium. These in turn are supported by columns varying in height from 9.5 m to 12.5 m. The variation in column height is required to form the sloping roof profile as defined by the Architect. Due to the stepped nature of the roofs, the main contractor actually has to build the steelwork which springs from the third floor slab first and then work down the building. Within Scia Engineer the RC slabs and cores were designed using the FE package for both gravity and lateral loads. The steelwork was designed utilising the steelwork module. The ground conditions within the site comprise highly weathered chalk. Typically the chalk head was 2-3 m below existing ground level. There was evidence of historical shallow mining within the chalk. Chalk had been mined in the local area for agricultural reasons. A thorough investigation of the site was performed by the use of cone penetration tests located at every column location. This showed two areas were the depth to the chalk suddenly dropped to around 9 m below ground level. Further cone penetration tests were performed at these locations to enhance our knowledge of the chalk profile and enable a contour plot to be produced. Being able to extract accurate foundation loads from Scia Engineer enabled the pile lengths at each pile cap to be optimised. The University of Hertfordshire, Student Forum
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