Project ‘IMEC Tower’, calculated with Diamonds

Placed as an exclamation mark into the landscape, this impressive tower emphasizes imec’s unique status as world leader in Research, Development & Innovation in the field of nano-electronics and digital technologies.

A building packed with challenges

It includes an underground car park comprising four basement levels, a laboratory stretching over two floors, and the actual tower with its 16 levels of office space accommodating 450 people. From top to bottom, this building is fully packed with structural challenges.

However, it’s the superstructure’s design of an upwardly widening dual core that mostly catches the eye. It has all upper floors cantilevering, without any columns in the tower building’s facades to support the floors. “The Diamonds 3D model was obviously indispensable to evaluate the effects of wind loads on this kind of structure” starts Jan Van Aelst.

“But what makes this project very special are the stringent requirements related to the deformation of the facade elements. These glass elements are attached to steel columns acting as spacers between different floor levels. To be 100% sure that the distance between such levels remains nearly constant (such that the deflection of the facade elements is limited), we paid much attention to relative deflections between floor levels.”

A structural model of the building process

In particular, Diamonds was used to estimate the impact of concrete grade on floor deflections. Special attention was given to how deflections change over time, accounting for the effects of concrete creep and cracking. The goal of this analysis was to assure that floor deflection differences at all times remain within given limits, especially along their edges where the facade elements are suspended.

Read more on the project ‘IMEC Tower’

This project has been calculated with the structural engineering software Diamonds. Learn more about Diamonds