Between October 2003 and July 2004, Arup, in a joint venture with the Dutch airport planners NACO and the architects Foster & Partners, designed the Terminal and Ground Transportation Centre needed for the 2008 Olympic games at Beijing Airport. Work commenced on site in March 2004 and ended almost four years later with the opening ceremony in February 2008. This was the team's third airport together, the forerunners being Stansted Airport, London, in the late 1980s and Chek Lap Kok Airport, Hong Kong, in the late 1990s. For each terminal the basic engineering diagram is similar.The design of airport terminals is predominantly influenced by functionality. Externally, they are constrained by the movements of land transportation systems on one side and aircraft on the other. Internally, large numbers of people and baggage must flow from entrances to departure gates or arrivals gates to exits. Both the non‐public areas, like the baggage‐handling facilities, and the public areas need column‐free spaces to provide maximum flexibility and unimpeded passenger flow.Forces in roofs and floors increase with the square of the span and result in large member sizes, but these must be limited because the overall height of airport facilities is restricted. Furthermore, a deep roof structure will impair the ability for natural light to pass through the roof into the building's interior. Both requirements can only be achieved with a carefully integrated design.Airport terminals are characterized by the fact that the climatic and other physical conditions for which they must be designed vary across the world. For example, whereas Chek Lap Kok had to withstand typhoon wind loads and is located in a subtropical climate, Beijing is in an active seismic zone and experiences large seasonal temperature fluctuations. However, they must be able to accommodate the same aeroplanes worldwide while exhibiting their own form with respect to geometry, modularity, repetition and the use of information technology in the design, analysis, specification and fabrication.Today, fabrication technology is changing rapidly thanks to the application of computerized analysis and fabrication methods in engineering. This in turn influences the structural concept and design. A manifestation of this is illustrated below.
<p>Between October 2003 and July 2004, Arup, the Dutch airport planners NACO and Foster and Partners designed the new Terminal 3 for Beijing Airport and a railway station connecting the airport with the City. The large number of docking stations and optimization of passenger travel between gates were the preliminary influences shaping the footprint of the airport. The decision to subdivide the terminal into national and international arrivals and departures lead to two terminal areas (T3A and T3B) arranged on the longitudinal axis and connected to each other by a public transport system. Their symmetrical arrangement to the longitudinal axis of the terminals allowed for a double curved roof along the main axis. The load bearing behaviour of the two terminal roofs was highly influenced by lateral forces due to wind and seismic loading. The down stand beams together with the reinforced concrete columns stabilized the structure by moment frame action only. As a consequence, the roof had to be stabilized by the cantilevered steel columns alone. This allowed that seismically introduced lateral forces could be submitted to the columns proportional to the column bending stiffness and not concentrated at a limited number of braced columns locations. The double curved roof for Beijing Airport is a modular space truss system. The enormous size of the two roofs for Beijing airport and the construction grid of 4.5m resulted in 18,262 connection points and 76,924 connecting members.</p>
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