19 April 2022
The Impossible Dream: Riding the Wave with CAD & BIM
Imagine growing up in a picturesque town with a small population. You and your buddies have played Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty until you’re sick of them. When the weather is good, you hang out at the lake or down by the river, but there’s really not much else to do. You talk endlessly about The Dream: surfing. Sometimes, those conversations end with a sigh as you longingly gaze at the posters covering your bedroom walls: legends such as Kelly Slater and Bethany Hamilton, or the movies you can rerun with your eyes closed: Endless Summer, Point Break and the smoking-hot surfer girls of Blue Crush.
In your mind’s eye you feel the wave beneath your board, the wind in your hair and the sun on your face. So, what’s stopping you? Well, there’s just one tiny technical difficulty: You live in a landlocked area. No coastline, no beaches, no surf culture. Zip, nada, nothing.
Luckily, CAD and BIM aren’t reserved only for “serious” projects such as building bridges and stadiums or designing new machinery or parts for industrial applications. Every now and then, a project comes along whose sole purpose is fun.
Ingenious CAD and BIM professionals decided to make the dreams of surf-deprived landlubbers come true.
He Who Dares To Dream
Some ingenious CAD and BIM professionals decided to make the dreams of surf-deprived landlubbers come true. If they couldn’t bring the surf dreamers to the waves, well, they’d bring the waves to the surf dreamers.
This wave-junkie’s dream actually happened in the small Austrian town of Ebensee, where the world’s largest, year-round surfable rider-wave has been installed on the river Traun.
Known as THE.RIVERWAVE or TRW, it was a complex project, undertaken by an international multidisciplinary team of engineers, geologists, ecologists, steel construction specialists, river engineers and wave designers, spread across Germany, Austria and the United States. Four years of planning and nine months of construction produced a wave about 33 feet long and up to five feet tall that can be surfed during all four seasons. Dude, we’re stoked!
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Go Surfing
From the get-go, there were constraints to overcome. First, the wave couldn’t be built directly into the river due to environmental regulations, so water had to be diverted into a separate canal to contain the wave. Additionally, ecological constraints demanded that a fish ladder — which enables fish to more easily swim upstream to spawn — be built to compensate for the water being diverted from the main river into the canal, which altered the normal watercourse.
In the canal, a steel hydraulic flap was installed to precipitate the wave and adjust to varying water levels throughout the year. Immense bearing forces are exerted on the canal’s cantilevered wall sections during the movement of the hydraulic flap, so the channel walls — and the angled recesses that house the hydraulic cylinders that control the flap — required some complex geometry to become a reality.
Given the complexity of the project and the number of participants, the design of the wave was completely planned in 3D. A physical model was used to create the shape of the wave and, by adding seasonal data, ensure that it could be surfed year-round by adjusting the steel flap, regardless of the Traun’s varying water levels.
It was a complex project, undertaken by an international multidisciplinary team of engineers, geologists, ecologists, steel construction specialists, river engineers and wave designers.
Using model-based planning produced obvious advantages for all the project participants. Exact volumes and quantities could be determined, resulting in precise planning and accurate cost estimates. A separate model was created for the excavation project that ensured accurate earth removal and precision modeling of the terrain, with the excavators using GPS for maximum accuracy.
TRW is not the first man-made wave, but, unlike other similar river waves, it requires no additional energy to direct the water or control its volume and speed.
Following extensive testing for safety, flood protection and groundwater protection, THE.RIVERWAVE was put into operation.
Thanks to the accuracy of the engineering, model-based planning and excellent project execution by the contractors, the difference between the 3D model and the completed structure was less than a centimeter, or less than 0.39 inches.
Awarded the Bavarian Engineering Prize, THE.RIVERWAVE proves that for those who dream of riding a wave, regardless of where you live, it’s possible to grab a board and hit the water — fulfilling The Dream — even up in the mountains of Austria.
Ride the Wave to Success
While we can’t guarantee that your next CAD or BIM project will be quite as much fun, we can certainly make the process a lot more fun. MicroStation®, Revit® and AutoCAD® all have aspects of repetitive tedium that can suck the fun right out of any project. But, with a tool that behaves like your personal assistant, you can neatly sidestep the drudgery and get on with what you do best: designing the future. Leave the heavy lifting to your new “assistant.” Check out your options for enhanced productivity plus peace of mind for MicroStation, Revit or AutoCAD, or call 727-442-7774 to get your questions answered.
The difference between the 3D model and the completed structure was less than a centimeter.
