Value Engineering for Warehouse and Office Building

Beta Scope

To carry out the value engineering and produce the most economic structural design for the warehouse and office building.

Background

Beta Design Consultants have been appointed by Gorge Fabrications to carry out the value engineering and produce the most economic structural design for the warehouse and office building. The preliminary and initial structural design was carried out by another firm. The main aim of the project was carry out value engineering to provide a structural design with reductions in total steel weight and total installed cost compared to the original structural design.

Our engineers carried out the value engineering for Unit 2, a portal frame warehouse with a floor area 10,000 sq ft and a span of 23m. The single storey warehouse is linked to a two storey office with a steel frame supporting composite deck concrete floors.

Beta Solution

As a part of Value engineering our Structural Engineers carried out a preliminary analysis followed by a detailed structural analysis, with the use of Scia Engineer. The aim was to maintain standardization, keep connections standardized but at the same time reduce section sizes of the portal as much as possible. The partial fixing of the portal frames bases in the warehouse was taken into account in deflection check. According to both the British Standards and the Eurocodes, a nominal base stiffness of up to 20% of the column stiffness can be considered in the deflection check. This allowed us to keep the vertical deflections and lateral drift to acceptable limits. The 20% fixity was applied only when calculating the deflections under serviceability loads. Our solution provided a structural design that saved almost 7% of total steel weight.