PROFIS Engineering is an intuitive piece of software that allows skilled engineers to input the facts and figures pertinent to their project, select various options using their own judgement, and very quickly see what the impact of their choices is on the design. This will make the plate more flexible and use less material and operative labour time.” “You can end up with a thinner plate and optimal anchors, welds and stiffeners. Rather than saving Euros, however, you save on material and labour costs – which of course translates into pounds. You are using more precise, accurate, flexible design and that is what this software allows you to do for steel-to-concrete connections.”
“But looking in detail at the journey, accommodation and food you could end up with a budget of £1,700 that will cover everything. “Using a rigid design is like saying you’re going on holiday to Spain and picking a budget of £2,000 to make sure you don’t run short,” he says. Hilti’s rigorous testing process has come up with a sweet spot where if the increase in anchor forces (compared to the rigid plate) is less than 10% there is no impact on the total failure loads of the connection – and the software will let you know if you go beyond that level. He adds that going for all-out flexibility can be too dangerous. Taborda says conforming with Eurocodes makes it “almost mission impossible” to use this flexible-plate method of calculations to come up with the best connection design. “This introduces a complexity that requires detailed analysis.” “Most concrete-to-steel designs assume a rigid plate, but in reality there is deformation, and to get the most precise design you need to look at the stresses on all elements of the connection – the anchors, stiffeners, base plate and welds,” he says. Hilti product manager for technical software across northern Europe Carlos Taborda told New Civil Engineer last March that the firm was working on a fresh version of PROFIS that would “go beyond anchor design for improved workflow and increased productivity”.Ī year on, Taborda says this promise has been fulfilled by the PROFIS Engineering suite, which focuses on the calculations to maximise efficiency of connection by using a flexible base plate. PROFIS Engineering is the latest generation of the successful PROFIS brand, which is already being used in the industry for the last 15 years to ensure the most efficient anchors are specified and installed quickly and with minimal difficulty. This means designs can be reworked virtually at the click of a button, maximising the efficiency of both the process and the finished product.Įssentially the Hilti software aims to bring out the embedded skills of civil engineers by shedding the layers of complexity that often prevent their ultimate potential being realised on construction schemes.
The software enables engineers to input the parameters of their project and treat a base plate as flexible rather than rigid to understand the precise nature of stresses upon the different elements of a steel-to-concrete connection. Just 6% said they used a single software to design the whole connection. This highlighted that more than half of those polled used a combination of different IT programmes, hand calculations and technical guidelines and approvals to design the different elements of a connection – the anchor, baseplate, welds and stiffeners. That was the finding from a survey of 100 civil engineers, reported in more detail in a second article in February. New Civil Engineer reported in November that almost a third of engineers who regularly designed steel-to-concrete connections struggled because there was no software to design the different elements in one cohesive way. Hilti brought PROFIS Engineering to the market on 1 February following research that identified a need for an overarching solution to help finesse interfaces between the two structural materials. A software package launched to allow engineers to make complex calculations on steel-to-concrete connections could save time and money on civils schemes.
0 kommentar(er)
