Software for Structural and Dynamic Analysis

Panel Design with RFEM for Construction Project of Metropol Parasol in Seville

The Metropol Parasol was built in the historic center of Seville in Spain. Un-der its roof the building combines an archeological excavation, a market hall, an urban open-air venue and an extraordinary shadow construction made of timber, with an integrated restaurant and walks offering wonder-ful views over the town. The structural system is a hybrid construction con-sisting of timber, concrete, steel and composite steel.

Timber Construction with Panels Made of Laminated Veneer Lum-ber

The most interesting and impressive part of the Metropol Parasol is the accessible timber construction which is 150 m long and up to 28 m high. It consists of multi-layer glued timber panels of the LVL type Kerto-Q (pro-duced by the Finnforest company). Some structural innovations had to be made for the implementation, for example the polyurethane coating which is 2 to 3 mm thin, the connec-tion details optimized for mounting

and the annealing of the epoxy resin used for gluing threaded bars in place, which was performed for the first time in timber constructions. The annealing became necessary to raise the safety level because more than 60°C is reached in summer inside the timber structure. Both the structural engineer and the timber construction company decided on a connection system with glued-in tension bars representing a

way of connecting ele-ments appropriate for achieving a high load bearing capacity but which is at the same time of relatively low weight. The timber construction consists of approx. 3,400 individual parts with a total of 2,500 m³ of pan-els made of laminated veneer lumber used for the construction work.

Stress Analysis with RFEM in Timber Pan-els

As the panels are con-nected with releases in the intersection points around the vertical axis, the internal forces from the bearing capacity of plates are almost always negligible. Normally, the

stress design is reduced to the stresses occurring within the plane of the tim-ber sheet. The timber cross-sections in the branching points where the tim-ber gridshell is divided into a top and a bottom part were designed by Finnforest using RFEM and FE sheet models.

Companies participating in construc-tion:

Building owner

Ayuntamiento de Sevilla

Main contractor

SACYR S.A.U., Sevilla, Spain

Architecture

Jürgen Mayer H., Berlin, Germany

Structural planning

Arup, Berlin and Madrid

Timber construction

Finnforest, Aichach, Germany www.finnforest.com

Timber construction, detailed struc-

tural analysis and design

Finnforest, Aichach together with Harrer Ingenieure, Karlsruhe; PBB Ingenieure, Ingolstadt; APU engineer-ing, Braunschweig; Wevo Chemie, Ostfildern; Borimir Radovic, Knit-tlingen

Software

Dlubal Engineering Software Tiefenbach, Germany www.dlubal.com

Designed with Dlubal Software…

Design of a panel of circa 4 m x 6 m in RFEM (screen shot: Dlubal)

Metropol Parasol in Seville (photo: Finnforest)