Tianfu Agricultural Expo, China

Model data of an arched hall

• Length: ~ 328.08 ft
• Width: ~ 492.13 ft
• Height: ~ 144.36 ft
• Number of Nodes: 7,980
• Number of Members: 11,598
• Number of Cross-Sections: 54

Dlubal customer StructureCraft was responsible for the structural design and the coordination of this project. StructureCraft engineers used RFEM for the structural analysis.

Project

The Tianfu Agricultural Expo Main Hall is part of a major development program in the greater metropolitan area of Chengdu, which aspires to compete with other major economic hubs in China. Located on the western border of the Sichuan Basin, where up to 16,404-foot-high mountains meet Sichuan’s great plains, the wide views of waving rice fields and mountain peaks on the horizon inspired architect Cui Kai with the concept of the curved timber enclosures.

The result is a unique series of long-span timber structures, created through the cooperation of team members on three different continents in a year and a half, fulfilling the owner’s desire to showcase the economic power of the Chengdu agrarian region and provide a world-class attraction through innovative engineering and design.

Structure

The arched halls' main supporting structure is formed by triangle trusses with clear spans of up to 360.89 ft and heights of up to 144.36 ft. The chords of the trusses consist of glued-laminated timber Gl 24h, and the bracing, of steel S235.

The Larch double top chord is exposed to the weather, creating the need for a carefully developed weather protection and flashing concept throughout the project. On top of the truss bottom chords lie glulam purlins, supporting the exterior ETFE weather membranes which are pre-tensioned against the two neighboring arches. The steel base connections transfer the chord forces into massive concrete foundations through steel embed plates. Cable bracing in the area of the lower chords provides longitudinal stiffening of the halls.

Design in RFEM

In the early stages of the project RFEM was used to derive the internal forces and moments of the timber arches and to iterate between different truss layouts.

Once the final hybrid system of arches and trusses was locked in, the RF-TIMBER Pro add-on helped to design the timber chords according to Eurocode 5. Moreover, the model was refined to a level that the connection forces from the RFEM model were used for the detailed steel, timber, and cable connection design.

This extraordinary project was awarded the "2021-22 Merit Award | Wood Design & Building Awards".

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