The Thuringian company Bau-Consult Hermsdorf recognized the advantages of Building Information Modeling (BIM) years ago and is one of the pioneers among German planning offices in the use of model-based planning and collaboration.
The planning office also relied entirely on BIM for the construction of a new paper mill in Aalen-Neukochen. The "PM5 paper machine" project took third place in the Tekla DACH BIM Awards 2020 and comprises the construction of the new production building for Papierfabrik Palm GmbH & Co KG at the company's headquarters. A total of four Tekla models were created for the five sub-projects and approx. 28,000m³ of precast concrete elements were planned and installed.
Coordination via the 3D model
The new building will replace three paper machines currently in operation on the company premises. In order to keep downtimes as short as possible, the new building was planned in sections. Bau-Consult Hermsdorf is responsible for the largely complete prefabrication planning for the entire project, as well as parts of the structural planning and formwork and reinforcement planning.
In addition to the extraordinary size of the project, the design and detailing of the highly complex nodes of the longitudinal and transverse frames present a particular challenge. In the collaboration with BHM, it is one of the first projects of this size to be planned largely based on the exchange of IFC data. Thanks to the precise modeling, the cooperation between the planning partners was excellent. Coordination took place primarily on the 3D model in video conferences with screen sharing. The demand for additional information from the production and construction teams was also reduced to a minimum thanks to the detailed plans.
Tekla software solutions in use
All precast concrete elements for which production drawings are created with Tekla Structures are fully reinforced in the model and provided with all installation and assembly parts. The precise design of the reinforcement in conjunction with the detailed representation of fixtures in Tekla eliminated a large number of potential problems caused by collisions in the run-up to production.
Tekla Structures has proven to be a reliable tool for BCH, which is also ideally suited for modeling very large projects, such as the paper mill. The program also has a large number of interfaces that simplify integration with other solutions and collaboration with project partners.
At BCH, everyone normally works "under one roof", but the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020 required a decentralized option for further project processing. The model, which had previously been processed locally in multi-user mode, was switched to the Tekla Model Sharing cloud solution at short notice to ensure that BCH employees could access the model continuously, even when working from home.
BCH also uses the Trimble Connect Common Data Environment (CDE), which has also proven its worth as a BIM platform, particularly during the pandemic. The automatic model synchronization in Tekla Model Sharing automatically updates the Trimble Connect model when changes are written out so that it is also always up to date. All projects now run via the cloud platform, which has made working from home much easier and is also increasingly being accepted by project partners.
The unabridged version of the article appeared in Ernst & Sohn's BIM Spezialmagazine (2021).
Image sources: Fig. 1: BHC, Fig. 2: BHM Ingenieure, Fig. 3: BCH.
