Expansion of the Orly Sud Airport, Paris, France

Technical details

The extension of the Orly Sud terminal is a metal frame structure with a footprint of approximately 541 ft long by 147.6 ft wide and a total height of 69 ft. The floors are in a mixed structure. The facades are made mainly of high-rise glass products. Stability is ensured by porticos in the transverse direction as well as by porticos and Saint Andrew's crosses in the longitudinal direction.

Modeling and verification in RFEM

All the structural elements (stability, floor beams, purlins, headers, and so on) of the structure were modeled in RFEM; for example, more than 105,877.5 psi for a weight of around 1,653.5 tons. The power of RFEM made it possible to calculate the whole in the second order, taking into account the global imperfections in the elements of stability.

The nonlinear analysis represents a total of more than 250 combinations, taking into account the different directions of the global imperfections. The analysis converges with a number of load combination increments equal to 4.

Stability checks were performed in the RF-STEEL EC3 module and the RF-STEEL Warping Torsion extension for a profile analysis with torque.

The company in charge of manufacturing the metal frame was able easily to extract the forces at the nodes of the fasteners for the structural design using RFEM Viewer, the viewer version of the software.