An invaluable tool long used in the automotive and aerospace sectors is revolutionizing the construction industry. It’s called BIM — building information modelling — and it’s starting to gain traction in Canada.
“It’s still relatively new as a modelling tool for design of buildings,” said Cameron Kemp, an engineer at Vancouver-based design and development firm Omicron.
“I think our industry is very slow to adapt and change. Part of it relates to the technology. A building tends to be a large beast, and software and hardware to make it all work has only been economically available in the relatively recent past. It’s becoming more and more commonplace where you can see these photorealistic computer images of buildings.”
In many other jurisdictions, such as the U.S., Scandinavia, Australia and the U.K., BIM is widely used. Indeed, the U.K. has mandated the use of BIM in all major construction projects by 2016 in an effort to create a low-carbon construction industry and higher-quality buildings.
BIM is a 3D virtual model of a facility that enables architects and builders to fly around and through a project to visualize every component of the building from the exterior cladding to the columns, walls and roof to air ducts, elevator shafts and beams. Contractors are starting to utilize innovative applications of BIM by creating 4D models, essentially adding the fourth dimension of time to the buildings 3D geometry. 4D models link the 3D components to scheduling information and allows participants in the project to look at a 3D image of the building at any point during construction and thus visualize the entire construction process before ground has even been broken.
“You can run an animation where the building magically appears element by element in a time-lapse animation way,” explained Kemp, whose company is using 4D BIM on most of its projects, including a new secondary school in New Westminster. “Then you can study it and see if you want to do things in a different sequence.”
Because each discipline in a project — architectural, structural, mechanical and electrical — creates its own portions of the model, a user can see detailed information on any given area by a simple click of the mouse. This process helps identify design conflicts in the virtual model before workers even put on their equipment belts.
“It helps look for interference problems where an electrical conduit and a mechanical duct and a structural beam might be all in the same place and you wouldn’t necessarily catch it on a flat paper drawing but when you see it in the 3D model, the software … will draw your eye to the fact there is a conflict and you can fix it.”
In one of Omicron’s recent projects, a senior construction superintendent was able to shave three weeks off the construction schedule by running the 4D model through the computer.
“He watched it go up in the animation and thought ‘There might be some different way of doing this’ and went back and changed the schedule,” Kemp said. “By doing so, he cut about three weeks out of a schedule that was about 12 months long. That’s a fairly significant improvement on the schedule just by watching the animation and changing sequencing and refining.”
BIM also allows architects to understand the behaviour of the structure before its built, which helps them design a more energy-efficient building. Designers will input information such as sun angles, average temperatures, humidity — all the environmental factors — into the database to see how it affects a building.
“Then we run the energy model where we have the heat source inside the building, and calculate how much heat loss goes out the roof, the walls and the windows,” said Kemp. “It’s quite complex what’s going on. But before the building has been built … you can actually model how the building is going to perform in that environment in one year and calculate energy costs. Then you can muck around with the model and say, ‘If I put more insulation on the roof, what impact does that have on the energy I’ve consumed for a year,’ and so on. It’s stuff we’re able to do because we have this intelligent, real model of the building.”
BIM’s benefits don’t end there. Because the model contains every component of a building — air conditioners, vents, pumps, filters — maintaining the building once it’s complete is simplified and made more efficient. The model is simply handed off to the facility management company. This can be linked to a direct digital control computer system that turn things on and off during the day and through the seasons when necessary.
“So if something goes wrong, the DDC system will flag it. The other thing they use it for is scheduled maintenance to let you know when filters need to be changed,” Kemp said.
Sheryl Staub-French, a professor of civil engineering at the University of B.C., believes BIM is the future, because the traditional “design, bid, build” procurement practice using 2D drawings is neither efficient or sustainable.
“I did my first BIM project when I was a student at Stanford and we had amazing results — on time, on budget, fewer conflicts, increased productivity. It was a real collaborative effort. You get much greater benefit when everyone is working together and using BIM.”
She said a firm like Omicron is unique in that it has architects, structural, mechanical and electrical engineers and construction staff all under one roof working together.
Staub-French has been researching BIM adoption in the construction industry and ultimately believes it will take governmental leadership to get the industry to change in Canada.
“If you look at the U.S. and U.K. and other places where they have much more advanced BIM use, there has been leadership in the government to push people,” she explained. “What happened in the U.S. is that the federal government recognized that BIM would help them to more effectively deliver projects so they started requiring BIM to do specific things, like validating the architectural program and performing energy analysis as a minimum. What they are doing in the U.K. is requiring BIM starting in 2016 and in the meantime, they are helping the industry to get ready by creating all kinds of standards and guidelines for firms to prepare now for what’s coming.”