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| Newport station set to serve visitors to the Ryder Cup  With the Ryder Cup coming to Newport this weekend, the city's iconic new rail station will provide the gateway for thousands of visitors to the event. Designed by U.K.—based designer Atkins, with architectural support from Grimshaw, the new state-of-the-art transport hub forms part of a city-wide regeneration masterplan.Atkins' multidisciplinary engineering design team was appointed back in 2006 to develop the design for two terminal buildings, accommodation blocks and a connecting foot bridge, as well as external works for Newport station. The project's ambitious brief required that a functional and welcoming station be developed, with a modern design to bring the city of Newport into the 21st century. As the gateway to the city - and indeed to Wales - the resulting station needed to combine traditional station facilities with fresh and contemporary design. Now open to the public, the new 2,100 square metre station is nearly twice the size of the previous building and already gaining iconic status locally. The modern design also introduces some key operational energy saving elements such as the use of natural ventilation on the concourse and low power lighting in many areas. The connecting bridge is bespoke solution to an engineering problem. Limited space for supporting columns on the island platforms necessitated the construction of a lift enclosure that could also support the three bridge spans. To achieve this, a steel plate torsion ring beam was fabricated to sit above the reinforced concrete drum, with tapering cantilever arms to support the load-bearing truss ends of each of the bridge spans. The bridge structures must safely support high crowd loads and are as a result stiff assemblies. A compact lattice truss was therefore concealed below the level of the handrails on each side of the walkways, which curve outwards to allow passengers to walk around the island lift uninterrupted. The bridge section was lifted into position during track possessions over the Christmas period. It was installed in four sections, all of which were pre-assembled prior to being lifted, reducing the extent of work subsequently required over the tracks. To account for the time-critical nature of the 56-hour possession period, Atkins was required to model all possible sequences of combinations for the installation of the bridge elements - including a full 3D analysis model of the bridge structure - to give the contractor maximum flexibility. Hold points were built into to the schedule and methods for locking off the ring beam were created to allow trains to safely pass under a partially-erected structure should the lift have to be aborted partway through. The cutting-edge design for the new station makes use of the innovative featherweight material ETFE (Ethylene TetraFluoroEthylene). Thirty-one air-inflated cushions, created using two layers of film measuring 250 microns, around two or three strands of hair in thickness, make up the station's roof to form the distinctive bubble-wrap effect made famous by the Eden Project and the Beijing Olympics' 'Water Cube'. Originally designed for the space industry, ETFE is a hundred times lighter than glass, making it resilient enough to support 400 times its own weight. It requires just a fraction of the steel support of a normal glass structure, and also costs between 24% and 70% less to install. write your comments about the article :: © 2010 Construction News :: home page |