Some of our recent assignments

While this has been Quakeschool’s first year in a seemingly tough home environment, India, there were some useful lessons, rather these were reminders. The work has been reflective, mostly reinforcing the fact that efforts put in reiterative engineering, wherever it is carried out, help bring down project costs significantly. These efforts also lead to simplicity in design and its execution. At the same time, we also tried to understand the term sustainability in our projects.

We recently concluded some task-based assignments for a few of our new clients. Three interesting ones among these were-

1. Design for foundations of a solar plant in Samakhyali, Gujarat <link>

2. Design analysis of a bamboo structure in Nagpur, Maharashtra <link>

3 . Value engineering analysis of a ground-plus-ten-storied structure in Ahmedabad city, Gujarat <link>

The Samakhyali project is an upcoming electricity generation plant being run on solar energy. One of the important components is the plant’s structural foundation on which its panels and assembly will rest. The project was an opportunity for us to work with mechanical and instrumentation engineers from the US and India, where as a team we worked together to optimize the size of these foundation units, six thousand in numbers, hence also reducing costs. More on this project can be found at this link.

A completely different structural design work was an exercise with Wondergrass that introduced us to one of the fifteen species of the bamboo family used in housebuilding, called Dendrocalamus Strictus (or simply D. Strictus). We tested structural adequateness of this bamboo in a typical housing unit designed by Wondergrass. We also again learnt that although significant avenues in rural areas as well as government policies exist in India to promote bamboo as a housing material, it is still not being exploited to its fullest. A key reason for this being most people, including researchers and building practitioners, perceive bamboo as a non-durable and obsolete material; and more so for house building on a large scale, hence overlook the versatility it offers as an alternative material. For details of this project please visit this link.

Through the ground-plus-ten-storied structure project, we conducted a computer based 3-D analysis of a typical high rise building in Ahmedabad city. This high rise structure is made of cement and embedded steel for extra tensile strength, which are most expensive of these materials. This type of construction can be seen in almost all developing countries because of the flexibility its primary ingredients—cement and steel—offer. Engineering in a way is for ensuring safety and reducing costs, and here our aim has been to analyze this structure from a ‘value engineering perspective’, so we could reduce its cost by checking consumption of its basic ingredients. Project’s details can be found here on this link.

In executing these small projects, we realized that whatever be the scale of building structures we design, or the material we use, if intelligently engineered will not only bring down the costs but can help in addressing the issues of sustainability as well, which has societal and economic at their own levels.