These nodes reduce to some three meters across, small enough for Watson to weld into assemblies of four nodes. Above the observation platform, the diagrid will have four nodes per level. The “stars” are trucked as individual pieces to London, which is 320 km away.Įight stars form each diagrid ring of the tower’s stem. Watson is fabricating the diagrid nodes as “stars,” each with six “arms.” Some of the “arms” for the diagrid are about two m long, including tubes with diameters of up to 51 centimeters. A small team from Watson’s affiliate, Steelcraft Erection Services Ltd., Dalton, is putting up the diagrid. Stadium subcontractor Watson Steel Structures Ltd., Bolton, is fabricating the steel, supplied by ArcelorMittal. To get Orbit built, ArcelorMittal negotiated a design-build contract with Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd., Hemmel Hempstead, which leads construction of the stadium adjacent to the monument. A 40-tonne, pendulum-tuned mass damper will curb wind vibrations.
Emergency stairs, enclosed in steel mesh, will spiral down the diagrid’s exterior. Rising from a roughly 30-m-dia ring of pile caps, the vertical main steel diagrid-about 8.5 m in diameter-will enclose two elevators leading to the observation platforms. The firm defined Orbit’s geometry-for use by the fabricator-with Tekla software, he adds.
London olympic sculpture software#
His team used Arup’s GSA software program for analysis and design. “As soon as you freeze the geometry, you put in the loading, allows you to dimension the structural members,” Falter says. Because of the geometrical complexity, “you cannot show the structure in 2D drawing,” says Holger Falter, Arup’s associate responsible for the structural design. The entire design process was done “in the virtual world,” he adds. To help develop Orbit’s shape, Arup’s engineers made extensive use of in-house 3D simulation software, says associate director Francis Archer. The firm secured naming rights, dubbing the monument the ArcelorMittal Orbit. The snaking tube will be grounded at piled foundations at two points, forming its second and third structural legs.ĭetailed design work began after the mayor procured in February 2010 a single donation covering 86% of Orbit’s $36-million budget from Lakshmi Mittal, chairman and CEO of Luxembourg-based steelmaker ArcelorMittal SA. With constantly changing sectional dimensions in its roughly 500-m-long trajectory, the structure will be connected by steel brackets welded to points on the vertical tower. Like a loosely knotted rope frozen in space, Orbit’s diagrid tube will rise about 80 m to a 20-m-dia, two-floor observation deck, before twisting and turning around itself. The team’s seemingly unstable tower/sculpture won a design competition in 2010 promoted by London Mayor Boris Johnson.
The structure is the creation of U.K.-based artist Anish Kapoor and structural engineer Cecil Balmond, former deputy chairman of the engineering firm Arup Group. The red steelwork being built just outside the main stadium’s entrance, so far around 40 m tall, is the diagrid stem of the fantastic 15,000-tonne sculpture known as the Orbit. Adopting Technology for Financial Insight.
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