doi:10.3850/978-981-07-7136-2_303
Design of the Singapore National Stadium Roof and an Assessment of the Potential Benefits of High Strength Niobium Steels
Mike King
Principal, Structural Leader Singapore Sports Hub, Arup
Singapore 089315
Email: mike.king@arup.com
Biography
Mike King is a Principal in Arup’s Singapore office and Structural Leader of the Singapore Sports Hub project. Over his 22 year career he has come to specialize in long-span structures for major stadia, airports, sports arenas and stations in his native Australia, North America, the UK and South East Asia. Amongst his most prominent projects preceeding the National Stadium were as Arup’s Project Director and Structural Leader of the London Aquatics Centre with Zaha Hadid for the London 2012 Olympics and the diagrid-shell roofed new entrance building for London’s iconic King’s Cross Station. Mike has been a key figure in the design of long-span airport roof structures for Arup in Beijing and Toronto and led the design of the Manchester City stadium roof in the UK. Mike appeared in the Discovery Channel’s ‘Megastructures’ program and featured in ‘Going for green – Britain’s 2012 dream’ documentary on the construction of the London 2012 Olympic Venues. He also appeared in National Portrait Gallery’s ‘Road to 2012’ exhibition on key contributors to the London Olympic Venues construction.
Abstract
The 55,000 seat new National Stadium is the centrepiece of the Singapore Sports Hub project due to be completed in early 2014. The stadium features bowl cooling to all spectators as well as the 30,000 seat lower tier being able to be reconfigured and moved to transition from football to athletic and cricket modes. The roof is an exceptionally efficient dome structure spaning 310 m with a rise of 85 m from the ground level. The fixed roof dome structure will be the largest dome roof in the world covering a stadium and also supports a symmetrical movable roof in 2 halves. The fixed roof dome structure is formed by a series of arch shaped triangular steel trusses varying in depth from 5 m at the centre to 2.5 m at the base and a post-tensioned concrete ring beam support. These trussed arches are constructed from grade S355 steel CHS elements and span in multiple directions and cross the roof opening to form a highly efficient braced dome structure. To manage the design of such a hugemulti-element structure Arup used advanced parametric design software as well as in-house software specifically developed for the project to optimise and exchange information between architect and engineer, and then to fabrication. Due to the movable roof there is a varying load on the structure and fatigue needed to be considered. This paper focuses on the Fixed and Movable Roof design as well as the Post-Tensioned concrete ring beam support structure. The paper also describes an exercise to investigate the potential savings in material use that could have been made if higher strength, high elongation steel had been economically viable and could have been competitively tendered. It is shown that it could be possible to make a significant saving on element steelwork if either hot finished Niobium grain refined S500 or S690 could be adopted for similar projects in the future.
