Case Study: Dyson Village achieves accurate CLT pod design with SCIA Engineer

Dyson Village designs 108 load combinations with SCIA Engineer

The customer, a student accommodation complex called Dyson Village, faced the challenge of designing a unique structure of stacked and cantilevered cross-laminated timber (CLT) pods. The material's complex orthotropic properties and the project's modular, cantilevered nature required a sophisticated finite element analysis to meet tight deadlines and a strict checking process. The vendor, SCIA, addressed this with their SCIA Engineer software.

SCIA's solution involved using orthotropic plates in SCIA Engineer to accurately model the CLT's varying stiffness. The analysis of 108 load combinations allowed for the design of minimal connections, using only four bolts per inter-pod connection. The results were validated by full-scale testing, which showed a negligible difference of only 0.83 mm from the software's predictions.