Silver Spring, MD—Cartee-Berry & Associates, LLC (http://www.carteeberry.com)
The United Therapeutics Pedestrian Bridge is to be located in Silver Spring, MD and will serve as a connector between two eight story office buildings that will serve as the headquarters of the biotechnology company. The bridge will connect the two sixth floor levels and is to be constructed in the shape of a “double helix”. The “double helix” design was suggested by the United Therapeutics CEO to resemble strands of DNA. The walking bridge will be enclosed by a million dollar glass system.
Obviously the challenges presented by this bridge were overcome using SDS/2. The bridge elevation is constant on top, however it has continuous slope on the bottom.
A few of the obstacles that were encountered:
- getting the pipes to roll in the proper orientation
- proper location of the end points
- determining the varying radii of the rolled diagonals in order to stay within a prescribed tolerance for the glass system
- establishing a method to create a wrap around template for the rolled pipe “fish mouth” connections
- establishing a method to orient the wrap template correctly on the rolled pipe
- Substitution of temporary solid round bar rings to get the rolled pipe fits to cut properly
- Dealing with the “off the chart” number of polygons created that made the graphical detail files for this grouped member extremely slow to manipulate
- How to present the details in a manner that the project could be fabricated efficiently
Ultimately all of the issues were resolved using SDS/2 and we are thankful for that.
