Phase 3 at Aurecon
Following on from Mark’s last blog, I thought I’d give a quick update on where I am and what I’ve experienced so far on Phase 3 in Melbourne. Firstly, Mark has now joined me out in here, working just 5 minutes away from my project office, so It’s good to have some more Sappers around after Auggy and Glynn finished up in June.
I am working for Aurecon, a global consultant operating in 26 countries, primarily across Australasia, Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East. It’s been an interesting move, as Aurecon were the designers (in a Joint Venture (JV) with Jacobs) for the West Gate Tunnel Project (WGTP) – where I was placed for Phase 2 – and have found myself working with some of the team employed on the WGTP, so it’s been interesting to hear their thoughts on the project delivery aspects.
I’ve managed to distance myself from the WGTP (I wanted to get away from it and expose myself to something different) and am working on stage 2 of the Monash Free Way Upgrade (MFU), where I am working in Aurecon’s South Australian and Victoria (SAVI) Bridge Team; the project is another JV so several of the team are from GHD. The MFU project, in very short terms, is a major freeway upgrade to south east Melbourne’s main traffic corridor (think the M2 to London). The route will see several traffic lanes increased to the existing freeway in both directions (some 36kms as part of stage 2 – stage 1 (now completed) saw 30kms widened). This 36kms includes several existing bridge structures that will be widened to accommodate the increased traffic lanes/loads.
My role is officially two parts: ‘Bridge Engineer’ and ‘lead package engineer’, effectively coordinating the design of three of these bridge structures. Each structure is formed of prestressed (post tensioned) precast Super-T girders composite with a RC deck slab. Each structure varies in length, with the shortest being simply supported across two spans of 25.7m and the longest being simply supported across 8 spans varying up to 39m each. All utilise RC piers and abutments except for one prestressed pier. Fortunately, all the bridges (except for the one bridge which will utilise existing substructures previously designed for future bridge widening works) will utilise 400mm square precast concrete driven piles – the exact same ones I got so much joy out of on the WGTP …
So far, I’ve been responsible for producing two preliminary design reports (with the third coming next week) along with ensuring drawing packages are ready for release to the client for comment/approval. This has been challenging as most of my design team are based out of South Africa … communication seems to be the real challenge.
I’ve found myself going back over Richard’s and Shardi’s lectures recently, trying to piece back together lessons on prestress, post tension losses and grillage analysis (looks like I’m that ‘traditionally 1 in 3 students will…’ student) whilst learning the software ‘Midas Civil’ to model my bridge decks and structures (the software of choice in my team).
Like Ash’s earlier post, it seems all the younger engineers rely on the software first to model their structures without doing ‘hand calcs’ – while the more experienced engineers are using the software after running numbers on paper first.
I’m now modelling some of my Super-T girders in Midas, as well as performing some grillage analysis (slowly I must add). Midas is interesting as you can model the entire structure, including the substructure and piles, and run static/moving load analyses on the entire structure – to me, this seems like there’s a lot that could go wrong while being very confident/relying on the input parameters/data to be correct John’s ‘Rubbish in = rubbish out’ keeps coming to mind).
Anyway, here’s some pretty pictures of what I’m modelling at the moment – hopefully it works …
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Nice article – I’m not much help with technical bits. But the communication element is interesting to me.
Are you having to share large sets of data with your South African based colleagues; maybe some specialized CAD files etc.?
I think this is definitely relevant to work we are likely to do back home and we are likely to have the added hindrance of IT and comms infrastructure that may not be quite as powerful as in the commercial world. I mean the grass is certainly not always greener; I have certainly experienced IT trouble on attachment.
The complexity of maintaining security of the communication could also slow us down. I presume Aurecon will have security mechanisms as well to protect commercial in confidence as it is, but security for an overseas operation could prove problematic to maintaining communications at reach.
Hey Gary,
Yes, I think you are right. A lot of relevance for us and our future line of work. When I fist arrived, there was very limited ability to share the models (Midas, Revit and CAD), especially with the S. African office using a SharePoint we had no access to and them not having access to our Project Wise and Teambinder document control systems (a little like Acconex).
I’ve managed to get our team on Project Wise now so the ability to share these files is now easier, but the system is very slow on there end. We’ve also had a ‘Revit Guru’ start recently who’s got their draughtsmen on a live model (BIM application) so that’s also smoothed things out a little.
But you’re right, our IT issues would be far more difficult I fear in our line of work. But never the less, I think this is something we are used to overcoming, it’s more the time zone issues now with communications being delayed by a full working day.
On another note, I’m planning on coming up to the Gold Coast/Brisbane with family in April – I’ll drop you a line.