Powering Pile Design through Parametrics

Parametric design skills are increasingly in demand within the engineering consulting industry due to ever-pressing time and budget constraints on medium- to large-scale infrastructure projects. The structural engineering team at Arup examined obstacles and manual processes encountered by the team during the design of a piled noise wall and endeavoured to automate, or at-least streamline, many of them. This resulted in a 94% saving in pile cross- sectional analysis computation time compared to manually inputting pile cross-section and design actions into analysis software and designing the pile using spreadsheets. The team’s skills in parametric design in Grasshopper, a parametric modelling tool, and basic scripting were leveraged and developed throughout the process, providing an essential way of designing. The pile design process was selected to demonstrate the benefits of the parametric design due to it being a common design task on major infrastructure projects, such as pile wall design. The tool was developed with the intent of it being modular, employing a plug-and-play approach that connected the key stages of the design process with outputs, such as embodied carbon calculations and engineering drawings. McNeel Rhino, a 3D visualisation software, and Grasshopper were chosen for the tool development as they provided a user-friendly, visual programming interface and many plug-ins to existing automation workflows. Thus, enabling the engineer to interrogate the output of each stage of the design process both visually and numerically. The modular approach also enabled engineers to substitute ALP in place of Brom’s calculation, as the design progresses.