The IDEA StatiCa team took part in SMARTConnection workshop session organized by the Dutch Steel Society / Bouwen met Staal on June 27th, 2019.
Construction professionals from around the Netherlands gathered to listen to Rayaan Ajouz who presented the SMARTconnection research project, funded by Bouwen met Staal.
Within this research, new methods are developed to analyze steel connections in a smart automatic process. The goal of this project is to increase the feasibility and buildability of the design of steel structures by performing these analyses of steel structures on both global and detail levels and cost optimization. As part of the SMARTconnection research project, an integral analysis model for an industrial steel hall will be developed. The ultimate goal is to be able to make cost comparisons between variants produced by the parametric model.
KarambaIDEA integration
The new plug-in KarambaIDEA caught the extraordinary attention of the workshop audience. KarambaIDEA is a Grasshopper plug-in that enables to export steel joints from the parametric steel structure modeled in Karamba3D to IDEA Statica Connection for further analysis, on a detail level.
Karamba3D, one of the software packages used in the workflow, is a parametric structural engineering tool that provides accurate analysis of spatial trusses, frames, and shells. Karamba3D is fully embedded in the parametric design environment of Grasshopper, a plugin for the 3d modeling tool Rhinoceros. This makes it easy to combine parameterized geometric models, finite element calculations and optimization algorithms like Galapagos.
Read more about the project and download the Grasshopper file
KarambaIDEA demo videos
You can also watch the presentation introducing KarambaIDEA examples: