Construction
The dimensions of the plant in the ground plan are about 108 ft x 115 ft with a height of 49.2 ft. The top level of the continuous casting plant to be newly constructed is called the casting platform and is designed for a load of 3.3 t/10.76 ft².
On the casting platform there are control rooms and emergency buckets, which collect the liquid steel in case of failure, as well as crane runways and further handling devices.
The supporting structure consists of steel girders with a span of up to 50 ft. The biggest main beams have dimensions of h x w = 47.2 inches x 23.6 inches with plate thicknesses of up to 2.4 inches. The structure is reinforced by diagonals against seismic loads.
Structural Analysis and Design
In order to implement the planning of the extension quickly and effectively, the capabilities of digitization and data exchange between the various 3D planning and calculation programs were used from the very beginning.
The existing construction was first captured with a 3D laser scanner and was displayed as 3D point cloud. It was transferred to an RFEM file using a construction program with the import/export function as an intermediate step. The model was thus available as a basis for further analyses.
The structural analysis was performed according to Eurocode 3 in the RF‑STEEL EC3 add‑on module.
For a detailed display of the results, the graphical tools of RFEM were used; for example, to classify different categories of reinforcements and to display them in color in 3D graphics.
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