PANSTADIA & ARENA MANAGEMENT AUTUMN 2013
STANDING UP TO THE WEATHER
PanStadia & Arena Management talks to Doctor Melissa Burton, regional manager at BMT Fluid Mechanics (based in BMT’s regional offi ce in New York City) about wind engineering and computational modelling in the stadium sector.
When did the market for wind testing on major sports venues emerge in Europe?
Wind tunnel testing of large roof structures goes back to the days of conception of boundary layer wind tunnel testing. Wind tunnel testing became integral to the design process in Europe with the advent of enclosed bowl stadia with complex architectural shapes and with roofs that have complex structural arrangements to support large suspended spans. With this construction, roofs necessarily became more lightweight, and therefore more wind sensitive.
The largest stadiums featured enclosed bowls, so environmental design challenges on fi eld grass growth and seating areas became more prominent and required wind tunnel testing based investigations. The introduction and utilisation of fi nite element analysis in structural design meant large roof structures could be analysed in greater detail, meaning designers became able to feed the detailed information you can get from a wind tunnel test into a cost-effi cient structural design.
Does BMT work only with the architects and structural engineers, or with a wider array of the design team?
We at BMT work with a much wider array of the design team, often for example getting involved in helping to quantify anything from the natural ventilation potential of a particular louvered façade, to the effectiveness of seating bowl cooling features, to the potential for a greater number of home runs to be hit, to the times and climate characteristics when it is or is not safe to close a retractable roof. In addition, we will often work directly with the turf consultant to help quantify the availability of photo- synthetically active solar radiation across the fi eld to enable a strategic plan to be put in place for growing grass.
Does BMT use the same wind tunnel facilities in the US as in Europe?
Yes. While all stadiums might be different, and require different testing technology by way of instrumentation, the wind tunnel itself always does the same job, and that is to generate atmospheric wind profi les.
Was London 2012 the fi rst Olympics that BMT had worked on?
BMT also carried out wind and climate studies for venues in the 2004 and the 2008 Olympics. On the Beijing Bird’s Nest stadium, we collaborated with the design team to measure the effects of the wind conditions on the Olympic Flame, to quantify wind conditions over the long jump pit and running track, and determine effects of wind-driven snow and whether it would create unbalanced loading conditions on the lightweight roof structure.
Of all the stadiums that BMT has tested over the years, which offered the biggest challenge and why?
All of the stadiums that we work on are equally challenging because they are all so different and designers are constantly pushing the technology through ever-growing scale and architectural complexity. A few examples as to how each and every one might come with its own challenges are:
The Beijing Bird’s Nest stadium required advanced dynamic load effect analysis to quantify the structural loads, something
Olympic stadium
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