Øystein Ulvestad is a Norwegian structural engineer and BIM developer who uses Tekla Structures to model bridges in 3D. We spoke to him about the benefits of modeling in Tekla during the design phase of a bridge.
Ulvestad has been working with Tekla software for almost 20 years. In the first part of his career, he used it to design steel trusses, connections and other structures for industrial buildings. He then joined an infrastructure group that was using Tekla Structures to make concrete bridges. Since then, Ulvestad has designed around 30 bridges with the software. Today, he leads the bridge design team at Sweco, the engineering consultancy behind the Randselva Bridge project - winner of the 2020 Tekla Global BIM Awards. Randselva is a 634-meter-long cantilever concrete bridge built exclusively on the basis of BIM models, without drawings.
Ulvestad and his team use Tekla Structures together with the Grasshopper visual programming language and the RHINOCEROS CAD application. Structural engineers generally use Grasshopper for parametric modeling: a digital practice that uses rules and parameters to create complex geometries. The bridge geometry is first created in Grasshopper and Rhino, before the design is imported into Tekla Structures. Here the attributes are added, and the design is optimized. Parameter changes made in Grasshopper can be immediately reflected in Tekla Structures.
"Tekla works very well in combination with parametric design," says Ulvestad. "Your design becomes much more flexible, and human error can be eliminated. What's more, the parametric script is reusable."
