Leading British engineering design firm Arup has won the 40th annual MacRobert Award, the UK's biggest prize for engineering innovation.
HRH the Duke of Edinburgh presented the team with a £50,000 prize and the solid gold MacRobert Award medal at the Royal Academy of Engineering Awards dinner last night (9 June).
The team members sharing the prize are:
- Project director, Tristram Carfrae
- Structural engineer, Mark Arkinstall
- Building modeller, Stuart Bull
- Sustainability energy and façade engineer, Haico Schepers
- Fire engineer, Marianne Foley.
The Award is given for Arup's visionary National Aquatic Centre, known as the Water Cube, and the setting for so many phenomenal swimming events at last summer's Olympic Games. The project team made revolutionary use of virtual prototyping, which is changing the way both Arup and the building industry approach new projects.
The Water Cube, now providing a legacy in Beijing as a vast integrated water venue, contains leisure, training and competition centres. Conceptually, the Water Cube is an insulated greenhouse made from a lightweight structure based on the geometry of soap bubbles and clad in a space-age plastic material called ETFE. With 22,000 individual pieces and 12,000 joints, the polyhedral space frame is extremely energy-efficient and possibly the most earthquake-resistant building ever built.
Setting new benchmarks for environmental impact and resource consumption, the building incurs minimal operating costs. It captures 20 per cent of the incident solar energy - more than would be captured by cladding the entire building in photovoltaic panels. It also requires 90 per cent less potable water than an equivalent structure and uses 55 per cent less artificial lighting.
Dr Geoff Robinson, Chairman of the MacRobert Award Judging Panel, says: "The Water Cube was a stunning showpiece of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Its breathtaking architecture is matched by engineering innovations in fabrication, materials and environmental management, and a project schedule that many regarded as impossible. It shows yet again that UK engineering companies are amongst the best in the world."
The team's revolutionary use of multidisciplinary virtual prototyping and a holistic approach to building design represents a construction industry milestone. No longer does each new building need to serve as its own prototype. Instead, the technologies used to design the Water Cube will allow the building industry to match manufacturing sectors like the automotive industry in terms of cost, quality, and reliability.
"There is very little continuous learning in the building industry," says team leader Tristram Carfrae, "but virtual prototyping can change that, enabling us to achieve greater quality with less time and less money."
The team's new approach enables all engineering disciplines to use the same data sets, to work in 3D and to tune a new building for optimal performance and also model the way people move around inside it. The new methods have been used on projects around the world, including Giza's Grand Egyptian Museum and New York's Fulton Street Transit Centre.
London's Science Museum will be showcasing all four MacRobert Award finalists in a special display in the Antenna science news gallery. The free exhibition runs from mid-June until Spring 2010. The display will give visitors a unique opportunity to see the prize-winning technology for themselves. The Antenna gallery is devoted entirely to new developments in the fast-moving world of science and technology represented through a series of constantly-updated exhibitions.
Arup faced tough competition to win the Award - also shortlisted for this year's MacRobert Award were:
- Orthomimetics Ltd for novel medical implants enabling bone and soft tissue to regenerate themselves after joint injuries, aiding recovery and avoiding or delaying the need for joint replacement surgery.
- QinetiQ for the Tarsier system which automatically detects debris on airport runways, saving time and improving safety. Foreign objects and debris left on the runway can be catastrophic, as shown by the loss of Concorde in Paris in July 2000 after it ran over a piece of metal on take-off.
- Rolls-Royce plc for the Trent 900 gas turbine Aeroengine, providing power for the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft, for which it was the launch engine.