Empowering Structural Engineers: Automating Constructibility Checks During Design

MICHAEL GUSTAFSON: Before we begin the presentation, here's a safe harbor statement from Autodesk. I want you to take a look at this and read through this.

All right. This presentation is called Empowering Structural Engineers, Automating Constructability Checks During Design. Hello. My name is Michael Gustafson. I'm the Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Qnect. Qnect is a cloud engineering software that empowers structural engineers to be more efficient in their structural processes. And I'm excited to be talking about this presentation today about really what is the future of structural engineering.

The learning objectives that we outlined for the session are really threefold. One, we're going to explore the most common steel issues that are faced to structural engineers. This is in their design process, but also in construction.

The second objective is we're going to identify how constructability review occurs in both the structural engineering and the BIM modeling process. And then finally, we're going to explore and visualize some new Revit capabilities that us at Qnect have been working on and are delivering to help engineers better perform QA/QC design review of their structural designs.

So as an agenda, we're going to walk through industry challenges around this space of QA/QC, talk about example best practices. I'll do a product overview of the solution Qnect for Revit, and then talk about what the future looks like, not just with the current technology, but where we're going next.

So let's talk about industry challenges. And there's really three industry challenges that I see that are really shaping how engineers are looking at QA/QC, looking at the design review of their structures.

And the first is there's a growing trend around engineers for delegating their design. And what I mean by that, whether it's doing structural steel connections that are delegated or even things like metal decking to aspects of their concrete design, what we're seeing is a growing trend of engineers delegating their design.

And this is kind of related to the second trend where a lot of engineers are doing this because there's just not enough time to complete their design. There's a lot of pressure from the contractors to, say, order materials early. If you're talking about structural steel, that's an advanced bill of material. And so the designs are just not yet complete, and that's putting a lot of pressure on the engineers to deliver their designs in time and how to be profitable in that environment.

And then the third pressure we're seeing is the growing importance of embodied carbon. But with the importance of embodied carbon reduction, it's really changing the calculus on how engineers think about most efficient design, right? Just because a design is low cost and very constructable does not necessarily equate to low carbon. And so this creates kind of a challenge, a new dilemma for engineers to figure out, well, how do I actually optimize my design?

But all these aspects really are impacting then how engineers are thinking about or have to face coordination and QC issues. And this manifests itself through RFIs.

There's survey data out there, and we actually did a survey itself where for every million dollars of steel construction, we estimate it was 50 RFIs. And each of these RFIs equate to typically $1,000 impact in the project, but also the profitability for structural engineers.

We could see it's taking up to 10 days to respond to an RFI, and that really drags down the productivity, the profitability for structural engineers. So that's really the litmus test. The RFIs are the litmus test for, what is this challenge in dealing with RFIs?

And the biggest challenge then because of those three challenges we talked about earlier is this bridge between design and construction, right? And around the world, we see there's different regional best practices to try to plug the gaps here to address, how do engineers better communicate their design intent to construction?

In the US, we have the AISC Code of Standard Practice. There's legacy documents, such as the CASE 962D documents that's been around for a couple decades, and that provides checklists for engineers to go through and check their designs before they're issued.

And then in Europe, the UK, the British Constructional Steel Association, DSTV and Germany, France, the CTICM. These are all different resources that are available that are helping define these standards for the industry. And then also in Japan, the Structural Steelwork Specification.

And what's interesting, I would say, is the UK and Japan are similar to North America where engineers provide their design, but they're not necessarily doing highly detailed models. They might do connection design like in the West Coast, but they're not doing detailing. Whereas in the Nordics, Germany, and parts of France, they're doing the detailing, right? So the line in the sand of the handover is different, but there's still challenges that exist.

And if we talk about the US then specifically, what I'm hearing from the steel industry leaders there at AISC is the delegate-- the trend of delegated design is really getting to a critical juncture where there needs to be better communication between that handover of the design intent by the engineers to fabricators.

AISC's been building more language into the Code of Standard Practice where engineers are required to document special reinforcement areas of the frame. And if they don't do this, it opens up the opportunity for the fabricators. The trades ask for extras, and RFIs come because of that.

And so this is a growing concern in the industry. I think engineers are seeing the impact of more RFIs in the industry. And so being able to define better best practices within the engineering organizations is becoming important.

Over my years, I practiced as a structural engineer many years ago with a firm in Minneapolis. And I had the opportunity to join AISC at that time as a regional engineer. And there, it was interesting to see presentations from many of these steel experts like Jim Fisher. Larry Kloiber had a famous road show that went around the US around really defining best practices, for structural engineers when they're creating designs to minimize RFIs and to minimize impact and creating more constructable designs.

Other studies from the Rocky Mountain Steel Construction Association in the Colorado area to folks like Michael West, to Dave Ruby, Clifford Schwinger, these folks are really the examples of leaders in the US steel industry, really helping shepherd young engineers, future engineers through their experiences on defining these best practices.

But the challenges still exist, right? And we're trying to use then a combination then you can see of industry guidelines, experts in the industry to bridge this gap.

So what are some examples of these best practices? So what I wanted to do is categorize these types of best practices and actually walk through some examples of the most important types of QA/QC checks, right? Design review checks that engineers should be thinking about.

And I've organized them really into four buckets, and we're going to talk about really three of these four buckets today. Engineering, data accuracy, multi-discipline coordination, and constructability.

And with the first bucket, we'll be talking about some examples. And here is about ensuring that the quality control of the engineering is the assumptions in the structural analysis and the simulation, the prediction of the math and physics of the structure, and making sure that manifests itself, right? And so understanding the impact of connections, not just in terms of low pass and rigidity, but thinking about the impact on the overall integrity.

Data accuracy is about ensuring that documented design-- like, say, in the Revit model you're producing the design documents-- making sure that they're coordinated within-- between the structural analysis and the design, and that they're accurate, right? Dimensionally solid and with the data.

And then multi-discipline coordination, we're going-- not to go into too much detail here because there's a lot of great presentations at AU around coordination with other disciplines. But I did want to say the last one on constructability is really important because we see a lot of engineers don't necessarily think about constructability as part of their wheelhouse, right? They might think that the final installed structure is really what they're responsible for.

But from my experience designing as a young engineer at Ellerbe Becket and interviewing a lot of folks in the industry is it's really important for engineers to be thinking holistically. And a lot of the steel experts I mentioned earlier, you're going to hear them referenced in my following slides that they-- as the industry, they really believe that engineers need to be looking at the structure from its concept through construction.

So let's talk about engineering. So engineering, there's a number of different issues that come up around QC that are important. One is just upfront, engineers thinking about the frame design. A lot of engineers-- most engineers separate the frame design from the connection design.

The impact of this is that low pass might not be the most efficient. There could be risks with it. The behavior of the structural analysis itself with say, for example, joint stiffnesses are approximated. And also, it might not be the most cost-effective and low-carbon solution.

So solutions to this is really for engineers to be looking at connection design, even if they don't know the exact type of connections. We hear engineers say, well, we don't do the connection design because we don't know what the fabricator's preference is. But that doesn't mean you can't look at multiple different options and kind of bound the problem.

Engineers are very good at defining boundary conditions for their model simulations, right? And so doing the same thing with making assumptions around different connection types and seeing how the building behaves and sizing members appropriately is a good strategy. And this goes further about minimizing framing so that you minimize those special reinforcements we talked about earlier. And we'll be digging into that.

So this is an interesting quote from Michael West and Jim Fisher about design is not just analysis. It's also member design and actually designing the connections.

The second issue I wanted to talk about is the impact of coping on framing. And young engineers might be thinking about this when they're design-- you're looking at a Revit plan drawing. You see a W8 by 10 framing into a heavy W33.

And this could pop up as an RFI and a drawing where it comes back to you that, oh my gosh, there's going to be these massive copes, as you see in the upper right screen here where that's because-- especially at a roof condition where you have joist bearing right on top of a beam. So you're losing that inch and a half, and then you cope it even further.

So engineers need to take action. Like, OK, do we upsize the member of the beam or some other strategy? And I wanted to walk through just an example here in a video that shows this in a Revit model, what this looks like.

And what you're seeing here, this is the Revit environment and an app from Qnect that's identifying this framing issue in the model. And you can see in this list view, it's identifying where the connection length required is not meeting the minimum space available.

And so this check could actually lead to-- the memory capacity might not be met, or just, it's going to require a very complex connection. And so yeah, this is-- young engineers might face-- this might be the first type of checks that's important for them to learn about when they're learning how to put a building together, and so I wanted to highlight it here.

The next issue I wanted to bring up about engineering is looking at the column wall capacity where there's connections like shear tabs coming into those walls. And what we hear-- and this was actually pointed out by the steel constructability or the Rocky Mountains Structural Steel Construction Association out in Colorado is that when engineers are doing design, even if they're doing delegated design, it's really important for them to consider the HSS connections and that the wall thicknesses might not meet all the limit states.

Engineers might not be checking all these limit states. Maybe their structural analysis software checks these limit states. Some do, some don't. But being able to-- it's important for the engineers to make sure they're thinking about the framing, integrity, and limit states while they're doing HSS connection designs.

And so I wanted to show you an example here in Revit again where here's an example of an HSS column where things like making sure the right material grade is, of course, specified because of the material grade is-- a lot of engineers might not model in Revit with the right material grades. And then if you're linking that to analysis, you're not using the right material grades. And then addition, the thickness of the wall thickness, if you're using only a 3/16-inch-thick wall or a 1/4-inch wall, that might not pass the K1.3 checks.

So let's now switch gears. So that was on engineering. The next bucket I wanted to talk about is data accuracy. And so I wanted to walk through a couple of examples. And it's important for engineers to be-- when they're putting a building together is to be thinking about how the building closes.

I know I've worked on projects where the dimensions might look accurate on the drawings, but if you actually add them up around the building, they actually don't close, right? And so survey crews or builders are building off of that. That could lead to field errors. And so verifying that data is very important.

Another thing is if you're taking an analysis model, bringing it into Revit, and sending it to fabrication like SDS2 or Tekla, the work points actually should be going left to right, bottom to top on the global axis. I've heard of stories where fabrication, if that's flipped and not checked, it can actually impact the fabrication process. The NC files are incorrect. Shop drawings can be messed up. So those are the type of checks that-- I mean, if engineers are looking at passing models downstream, that's important. But just even for documenting their design drawings, it's very critical.

So here's an example in Revit, where we're looking at-- we're kind of analyzing the framing geometry in Revit where we're flagging where intersections of beams and columns-- where the work points aren't exactly where they need to be. So for example, here you can see that the beam work point is just on the inside face.

And some teams might have their own Dynamo scripts to check these tools. Having-- this is an example of Qnect's automation to be able to identify these type of tools to help teams identify these issues early in their process.

And the second issue around data accuracy I wanted to talk about is column splice locations. And what we see is engineers-- it's not engineers are getting better at this over time. Building Revit models where the work points are at least a four foot above top of slab, that's the rule of thumb.

And if that isn't specified-- and of course, if you would fabricate a model that way, that wouldn't be-- it wouldn't meet OSHA's standards. It wouldn't meet-- the connections would clash with each other. And it actually would lead to a bill of materials that's not very accurate.

So being able to detect these in the model as you're designing or doing-- at different stages of design reviews, then it's critical. So it could be at 50% CDs, 100% CDs, the next couple stages in CDs, and just making sure you catch these issues.

And all these issues that you're doing through the QA/QC process, you can do it kind of as you go through the design process. And then of course, do a final QC check at the end. So here in the model, we're just showing the four-foot offset on this splice that was successful, whereas the one that was down close to the top of steel actually is giving a warning that the column splice is too close.

So that's looking at data accuracy. The third bucket that we wanted to talk about then is constructability. And I recently had the opportunity to do a podcast interview with Steve Hofmeister, former Managing Principal at Thornton Tomasetti. And I know Steve way back when he joined Thornton Tomasetti. I was an AISC regional engineer. And he actually worked at Ellerbe Becket when I did.

And he's really passionate about over the years making engineers think about constructability. And I love this quote by him of imagining "a future where engineers respect constructability as much as they do design." And I think some engineers might feel intimidated about constructability. But I think that in the industry, we have the experts. We have those steel gurus. We can rely on fabricators to come in and guide us on this topic.

I know when I worked at Ellerbe Becket, we would bring in-- Larry Kloiber from LeJeune Steel in Minneapolis came in and helped shepherd us and teach us young engineers about these topics. But we think it's a very important topic, so we wanted to go through some of the lessons learned or the issues that come up around constructability and give some strategies for engineers to work on those.

The first is the shear connections, the connection tables. And I was guilty of this as well. The type of connections using standard load tables, whether they're based on beam depths with shear reactions or UDLs, which is Uniform Distributed Loading, all these steel experts say these are just-- they're simplified. In some cases they're over-conservative. In some cases, they're actually not. They can be unconservative.

And so the rules of thumb are really two things. One is listen to what the local fabricators are recommending. And as a minimum, put design forces on the drawings. We know this can be a heavy lift for engineers, especially if you're not keeping your Revit models synced with structural analysis. But the tools are getting better out there to do this. And if you provide those design forces for the design, it can help avoid challenges in RFIs that show up later in the process.

The second issue I wanted to bring up-- this is one that I really appreciated learning as a young engineer was around cambering differentials, right? And this is where young engineers, you spit out your composite beam design solutions for cambering, but you're not really thinking about the adjacency of these cambers.

And if you have too much of a difference between the neighboring beams, like say the C1 that you see, that red C camber of 1 and the 3/4, if those beams are too close together and you have too much of a difference in the camber, the metal deck will actually not bear where it needs to bear. And you can't screw in. You can't puddle weld. You can't connect that diaphragm, which is critical.

That will come back and bite you as an RFI. So using some type of feathering approach with these cambers, some rule of thumb based on the spacing of the members and what that difference between the cambers are should really be followed. Also, some recommendations from the steel experts was really to specify where the deck splice locations are, and that helps teams better manage this issue.

And then the third constructability issue I want to talk about is around parallel beams too close to each other. And this is just kind of general fit up. I think engineers might not be aware that how steel is being erected, you know, swung in and beam spacings and geometry can impact safety. And there are measures detailers can take with locations of connections on near side, far side.

But engineers can take action such as prefabricating assemblies. Like, if beams really need to be close to each other and maybe prefabricating them as a super assembly is more safe and more cost-effective to avoid fit-up issues.

Here is an example, though, like in the Revit model with Qnect for Revit being able to identify where these framing issues are. So any beams that are less than 18 inches apart, which is an industry kind of rule of thumb, will be flagged. Space-- or could be beams on top of each other where once you slide in a beam, are you able to fit up the beam above it and so forth based on the order? So both horizontal spacing as well as vertical spacing.

So those are some of the examples around constructability. So we talked about those three buckets around engineering, around data accuracy, and around constructability. So we think-- these are some of the key issues that we talked about that we think are important for engineers to be thinking about, especially young engineers as they're learning up and training.

So I'm very passionate about this topic. When I was working those years ago, I really learned a lot of these best practices. And so it was great when I joined the Qnect team and I learned that Qnect already had this 10-year start of documenting a lot of these issues around engineering, accuracy, and constructability.

And so about two years ago, we started developing a solution for Revit, working with engineers like Jeff Smilow who actually, we presented about this last year at AU around identifying these issues early and kind of teaching engineers about constructability as they're building Revit models. And so it's been a great journey here the last six months working with Autodesk's platform and Pelogic and Qnect, going through hundreds of simulations of joints with beta testers on identifying why steel won't connect.

And so we're happy to announce that Autodesk University, the Qnect for Revit, which is this cloud engineering app that automates the checking of these steel issues all within that BIM environment. So engineers can not just visualize and coordinate them, but actually resolve those issues in context.

And so many of the issues that we talked about earlier are the types of issues that Qnect for Revit is identifying. Within the buckets of engineering and documentation constructability, that includes checking for framing capacities, right? Checking the limit states on beams and columns, checking the limit states for HSS column wall thicknesses, looking at the steel connection design itself, both shear and axial for gravity and moment connections. And then from that checking and designing of connections, identifying those special reinforcement areas that are critical.

And then what's interesting too about the Qnect for Revit is the forces. Remember how I said the industry experts really say, we've got to use the forces, right? Not just use shear tables.

Well, Qnect for Revit takes both. Like, engineers can use their traditional shear tables, but then it also reads the end forces from both the Revit analytical model and physical model. So all those sources, both tables and from the members themselves, really are-- I see the current state and the future state of how engineers will be building their forces and doing connection design.

The second bucket is around documentation, being able to visualize those special reinforced joints for things like shear doublers or moment doublers, moment connections with special reinforcements, of doublers and stiffeners. Qnect for Revit will identify those issues and help engineers resolve those, and also look at on their coordination plans identifying where the issues that need to be resolved.

And then the third bucket is that constructability, being able to identify geometry issues, material grade issues, and meeting the AIS-- the codes for material grades. And then looking for erectability such as column splice locations and adjacent beam spacings.

So this is a quick overview. What's interesting here versus what I was showing you earlier with some of the examples is the data being Revit into the-- written into the Revit model is all stored as Revit parameters. So your users have the ability to color the model with their model settings, right? So this is-- really gives the engineers to customize the visualization of Revit as much as possible.

Green is steel that's connected successfully. Red are issues. And this is an example here of this HSS column that is denoted as having an issue. And then the Code of Standard Practice, of course, that we talked about earlier is being vetted here so that engineers can identify where there's special conditions.

And I just wanted to double click on that topic of the Code of Standard Practice. So when Qnect is checking these connections, it's designing the connections. So here, for example, you see the connection codes for these moment connections, but it's also flagging for the user where there are doublers and stiffeners for the beams, for the columns.

And the user can actually access the calculations through the end member parameters and see all the detail around the stiffeners. The doubler geometries, forces, welds, bolts, all the calculations, all the materials for those connection designs are there plus diagrams that can help inform the engineers of, OK, what do they actually need to document for their drawings?

And actually, what a strategy could be for the engineers is actually to resolve these issues. I know when I designed my moment connections, I would actually do that trade-off analysis. Do I upsize the column sizes to resolve-- or to eliminate the stiffeners and doublers?

And that leads into our future conversation around kind of optimization. Where are we going with Qnect for Revit? And we're excited about this first phase of doing QC review, but we really see the future going further, right?

And that's around-- you know, remember at the beginning I was talking about the trends around things like embodied carbon and how constructability plus low cost doesn't equal low carbon, per se. And the carbon narrative is moving faster. And what I'm saying here, the design for carbon is going to expand beyond A1 to A3.

A1 to A3 are really the life cycle analysis steps that we have very well documented in the US and in different parts of the world for material really and the shipping to the fabricator, and then the fabrication. Where the challenge is is going beyond shipping to the job site to job site. And we actually see that as we electrify the grid where A1 basically goes green to zero carbon or close to it, what that means is the blue on the pie graph becomes big. That means fabrication-- like, A3 gets big. And A4 and A5, which is really unknown, becomes very important.

This is going to shift the calculus for how engineers optimize their frames. The traditional way of saying, make everything the same, make everything repetitive is going to be challenged because increasing the material and increasing-- it's not necessarily going to lead to low carbon. So the math is going to be changing.

And then also, reuse and deconstruction is on the rise. So understanding the EPD values going beyond the A5s is going to create even more opportunities for optimization.

So Qnect is looking at where we can help engineers kind of complement how they're doing carbon-- reducing carbon today, which I see a lot of engineers doing it up early, which is very important. That's the big space on system selection, grid layouts, beam spacing and layouts.

We're helping on the interface between the shapes and the grades of the framing with the connections. And combining all these aspects of both, say, high-strength steel with connection optimization, we can see steel projects saving over 15-- over 15%.

And so this is where we want to go further with our cost carbon analytics. You can see that what we have today for Qnect for Revit is really focused on the QC, the resolving of issues, early connection, design, and optimization. But we're looking at going further with carbon analysis, connection drawings, and other things related to connections.

So just a couple examples of what we're working on now with cost carbon and analytics. This is a dashboard that shows how we can scan an entire Revit model, the framing, and then look at nine different connection strategies. It could be different combinations of-- preferences of connection combinations of double angles and shear tabs, extended shear tabs. It could be using one 3/4-inch bolt or using-- hey, let's use 3/4 inch with one inch, 7/8 and one and an 1/8, eight 490s.

The users look at all these strategies and find, which ones are actually the least carbon? Because it isn't like a blanket number on every project, and different projects can result in lower carbon. So we're excited about this technology. We actually worked on this last year, getting feedback from structural engineers, and they're going to start commercializing this over the next year.

And then the second bucket is around connection drawings, looking at, how do we better document, help engineers better document the drawings that they put together, their typical and nontypical details? There's challenges around ensuring that they have the right details for the right project.

Are things kind of in context? Are they relevant? If they're not relevant, that can lead to a lot of confusion and additional RFIs on projects. So being able to help engineers kind of document where their details are is a direction that we're looking at.

And then yeah, ending here on a great quote from Erleen Hatfield, President of Hatfield Group, is just with connections generally at that higher level of development, higher fidelity modeling that we see in fabrication software like Tekla or SDS2 and Advance Steel, wouldn't it be great if Revit had that greater capability? Autodesk has been doing great things of increasing the fidelity of the Revit models.

We're very interested in taking that further with connection visualization. And yeah, because this visualization in 3D coupled with constructability review, carbon analysis, doing trade-off analysis between cost and carbon, it really needs that context of the higher LOD, Level Of Development visualization to help engineers.

So with that, we're excited about this topic. I hope that you learned a bit about, what are the key aspects of best practices? What are the challenges facing the engineers around QC? What are the best practices that engineers are using in the industry?

We walked through three different buckets of types of QC issues and best practices that engineers can take to resolve those issues, and then also gave an overview of the Qnect for Autodesk Revit app, what's released now and where we're going next. And we're excited about this future for structural engineers. With that, I'd like to thank you.