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INSPECTION ON THE WING
Engineers are increasingly taking to powered flight to perform inspection and maintenance work with the help of drones
L
loyd’s building in London isn’t your average tall building, the iconic Grade 1 listed structure is an impressive 88m high and is clad with 12,000 square metres of glazing and 4,500 linear metres of stainless steel
covered pipework. Maintaining such a structure requires considerable amounts of effort and ingenuity. Inspection alone is time consuming, costly and potentially dangerous as the process uses abseiling specialists to access all the external surfaces of the building. Once they’ve identified potential problems, sometimes further inspection is needed plus remediation activities if necessary. Now, Lloyd’s architectural partners at Arup have come up with a faster, cheaper and safer alternative to abseiling using remote control drones to perform its annual survey of the external façade. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are now being used for as much as 80% of the survey. Abseiling isn’t completely eliminated though and Arup anticipate that 20% of the façade will still require a “hands- on” examination. According to Terry Blacker, Lloyd’s Facilities
Manager, the results have been excellent. “The use of drones to survey the building has reduced the risk from abseiling and saved time and cost,” he says. The Lloyd’s Building is one of the first UAV façade surveys undertaken in the City of London, enabled to some extent by a flexible insurance product with integrated third parties and invasion of privacy cover, which has allowed commercial UAV equipment to be used for this type of work. There are also strict rules in place, such as the type of drone being used which must always be in line of sight and have a predesigned automated flight plan. Lloyds needed CAA approval and NATS clearance. Road and pavement closure permits from the Corporation of London were also required when flying over the public realm.
Arup plans to use the images from the drone
flights to undertake the inspection work and update the existing 3D virtual maintenance model of the asset. This digital building and conditional information model is a unique and project specific interactive tool, which records not only conditional observations and any change over time but also captures planned maintenance and remediation activities through the life cycle of the building. T&TH
48 /// Testing & Test Houses /// March 2021
❱❱ Unmanned aviation is forming part of the building inspection work for the Lloyds Building in London
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