9 April 2002
Buro Happold engineers innovative new hangar for TAG Aviation, Farnborough Airport
The new hangar now on site at Farnborough Airport designed for TAG Aviation by architects Geoffrey Reid Associates, engineering by Buro Happold, will be nearing completion in time for the July 2002 Farnborough Air Show.
With three bays, the £9 million hangar will be large enough to house six Boeing 737s (two in each bay), or a number of smaller aircraft. Innovation in the design of the widespan roof sets this hangar apart from conventional aircraft buildings. Each of the three bays of the huge steel frame structure is capped by a vast lightweight steel arch supported on “A” frame legs and clad with Kalzip standing seam roof sheeting. With each arch just 3m deep spanning 90m and acting in compression, the elegantly engineered design has provided benefits to the project – reducing the amount of steel needed to create the roof, reducing both weight of steel and costs to the client. To limit the overall height of the hangar without compromising headroom requirements, post tensioned beams in the ground are used to resist the thrust generated by the arches.
The hangar area itself is 290m long, 45m deep and 22m high at the apex. By using arches as the main structure, it was possible to locate all the office and workshop space within the main building envelope instead at the rear of the hangar, as is common in conventional hangars, without compromising usable hangar space. The roof is punctuated with openings clad with polycarbonate roofing sheets, allowing natural light to reach all areas of the space inside.
The hangar represents a break away from the conventional approach to designing essential use aircraft facilities, minimising building volume, clad area, wind loading and structural weight by avoiding the high eave and gable ends normally associated with such buildings. It forms part of a complex of buildings commissioned by TAG Aviation – the first structure, a new flight control tower, is nearing completion. Buro Happold senior structural engineer Thomas Gabele comments, ‘TAG Aviation’s brief was for a building that had architectural quality, and yet the ability to compete with conventional “shoe box” design and build options was critical. The Geoffrey Reid Associates design, with the sweeping curve to the roof, gave us the opportunity to explore alternative engineering solutions to how we can design elegant wide span structures in steel. The resulting lightweight steel frame is visually pleasing, and still represents an economic solution to the client.’
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Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in 1976 offering civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity surveying, building services and environmental engineering, infrastructure and traffic engineering, geotechnical engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics analysis, access consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD services.
