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COVER STORY – London Olympics

COVER STORY – London Olympics

Golden daffodils spring up in the Olympic Park parklands. all photos:

London 2012/LOCOG/ODA

As we enter the final 100 days to the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Engineers Australia magazine takes a look at the engineering behind the event and the lessons learnt during the construction program.

By Danny Cameron

T

SHARING THE

LESSONS FROM THE OLYMPIC CONSTRUCTION PROGRAM

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he Olympic Games is a major international event that brings together the world to showcase athletic prowess within a complex of engineering and technological wonder.

Thirty four venues will host sporting events from 27 July to 9 September for 10,500 athletes in the Olympic Games and 4200 athletes in the Paralympic Games.

The Olympic Games movement has a history of revitalising sectors of host cities that have fallen into disrepair, and just as former industrial land was rehabilitated in Sydney when it hosted the games in 2000, so too has London embarked on a thorough transformation of a contaminated industrial site around Stratford for its main sporting precinct.

The main Olympic Park precinct in London is 246ha in size and holds nine of the major competition venues.

Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) director of design and regeneration Alison Nimmo said: “In just seven years a talented team of engineers and other professionals has transformed one of the most derelict and neglected sites in Europe into a spectacular theatre for the world’s largest sporting event – and laid the foundations for a dramatic regeneration of a large swathe of east London.”

London’s winning bid promised a contemporary approach to games planning, placing a longterm legacy at the heart of its proposals. Organisers were adamant that the event provide more than just one month in the spotlight. As well as ensuring the site is fit for use by the people of the city of London beyond the event, the ODA has developed a “Learning Legacy” to share the lessons learned, best practices and innovations from the construction project for the benefit of everyone.

Launched last October, the Learning Legacy website (http:// learninglegacy.london2012.com) currently includes documents produced by ODA and a range of contractors, designers, industry professionals and academics. These are based on 10 themes including design and engineering innovation, health and safety, procurement and supply chain management, program and project management, sustainability, systems and technology, and transport.

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COVER STORY – London Olympics

COVER STORY – London Olympics

A panoramic view capturing a large part of the London Olympics site, in a state of partial completion in December last year.

Beyond the website, more than 50 events are being run to provide the opportunity for ODA, the delivery partner, contractors, designers and others to share the lessons learned with their peers. Industry partners include the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), as well as the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the Association for Project Management and the UK Green Building Council.

As well as the London 2012 Learning Legacy website, specific engineering documentation, papers, case studies and videos of the lecture series are available on the ICE and the IET websites (www.icevirtuallibrary.com/info/learninglegacy and www.theiet. org/sectors/information-communications/ict-2012.cfm).

At the launch of the Institution of Civil Engineers program of events, ICE London chair Rachel Skinner said: “The learning legacy goes straight to the heart of what the institution was set up to do. This series of events underpins one of our primary objectives of encouraging the exchange of specialist knowledge and the ongoing development of innovation and excellence across the engineering profession. We encourage you to learn more to ensure the lessons learned from London 2012 continue to deliver a sustained and positive influence for the construction industry and wider society.”

At the same event, ODA chair John Armitt said: “Transparency has been at the heart of everything we have done, and contractors have been transparent with us about the challenges they have faced and I hope this is reflected in the [Learning Legacy] documentation. I hope it is a step change in the way we go forward in the industry – there is now the opportunity to do this more regularly. This is what the next generation now know – the level of achievement and expectation that is important.”

The underpinning management processes On 6 July 2005, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge announced to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) General Assembly in Singapore: “The Games of the XXXth Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the city of London.”

The ODA was established in 2006 to be responsible for developing and building the new infrastructure and venues in London. A private consortium known as CLM was appointed 32

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through competitive tender to become the ODA’s delivery partner. CLM consists of CH2M Hill, Laing O’Rourke and Mace.

Since then, a £7.2 billion (A$11 billion) program of development of infrastructure and venues has been delivered on time and on budget.

The key factors which underpinned the successful delivery of the construction program are discussed in a Learning Legacy paper by Imperial College Business School senior research fellow Ian Mackenzie and reader in innovation management Andrew Davies.

The authors explained that the program posed three main challenges: a tight, well-defined timescale; the scale of the project, involving 70 separate projects with significant interdependencies; and a wide range of stakeholders with legitimate influence.

“It was found that favourable program outcomes were directly attributable to three ‘headline drivers’: the rigorous use of five key project and program management processes; the explicit specification of a series of targets and principles around other key program objectives (such as health and safety); and a pervasive high-level management philosophy adopted across the entire program,” Mackenzie and Davies stated.

Management procedures set up and operated by ODA and CLM first involved an upfront planning process where the defined scope, specifications and initial budgets were established in 2007. A detailed project and program monitoring process was deemed important, with monthly progress, budget and future program reports required and audit regimes established.

“It was like working in a fish bowl,” one CLM project manager responded to a survey by Mackenzie and Davies.

The extensive monitoring regime dovetailed into a problem resolution process where parties would meet to identify problems, look at all the available options and find the best solution. This flowed into a change management process where significant changes were reviewed by a “change board” chaired by the ODA. An integration management process then identified how a change in one project would impact on others, and integration committees were operated during both design and construction phases. The authors found these processes, along with tight documentation, “meant ex-post payment disputes were all but eradicated”.

Mackenzie and Davies said: “Taken individually, these ap-

proaches were not particularly innovative. What was striking, however, was the level of effort and rigour with which they were pursued and executed.”

The authors interviewed around 30 senior project managers in preparing the paper and quoted several who thought the scrutiny was “overly bureaucratic”.

They also noted CLM staffing levels reached around 600 at peak, and that if around 200 ODA staff are also included in program management costs, then it could be surmised that the “program management cost will come out around 10% of the overall program spend”.

“If we assume that the minimum level of program management would be 5%, then the issue is whether the extra 5% is worth it? Across the program, the clear consensus is that the extra 5% has indeed been worth it,” they concluded.

Around 1500 UK firms won over £6.3 billion (A$9.7 billion) of contracts and Mackenzie and Davies said the culture that developed on the project has had a significant impact on raising the standards of practice across the UK construction industry.

In the interviews, they found the advocacy of a desired aspect of the culture was often attributed to key individuals.

One of Engineers Australia magazine’s Top 100 most influential engineers and ODA chief executive at the time Sir David Higgins was cited for the culture of collaboration. The culture of high health and safety standards was attributed to Bechtel’s Ian Galloway and rigorous program assurance processes were attributed to Laing O’Rourke’s Richard Rook.

When examining the construction program’s procurement and supply chain management strategies, lessons learnt are detailed in a paper by ODA head of procurement Mike Cornelius, ODA deputy head of procurement John Fernau, CLM head of procurement Paul Dickinson and former ODA head of procurement Marag Stuart.

As the construction program represented 112 major construction and engineering contracts awarded through the life of the project, “ODA faced the risk of engaging with the same supply chain on several contracts and exceeding its capacity,” Cornelius et al said.

One of the important lessons was found to be how ODA mapped potential supply chains for each contract prior to awarding each contract and then post-award. All critical supply

chains were identified and monitored carefully during delivery.

“The depth of information gathered on each tier of the supply chains also presented an opportunity to integrate the supply chains horizontally across projects and achieve efficiency via aggregated demand at a program level,” the authors said.

Constraints drive innovation At the start of the construction program the ODA set a number of objectives that contractors had to meet across quality, delivery, cost, program and policy. These objectives contained targets and principles that were non-negotiable, but contractors were free to choose how to implement them in their own way.

This passed the innovation baton to the private sector and ODA utilities and public realm director of infrastructure Simon Wright said at the launch to the Learning Legacy initiative at ICE: “Constraints really drove innovation. We put the requirements into the brief at the early stages, and then challenged the designers to come up with innovative solutions and the contractors to deliver them. Almost without exception, the parties have risen to those challenges and we have some fantastic outcomes here.”

One of these principles was sustainability, and London 2012 now boasts some impressive statistics. 98% of construction waste was reused or recycled. More than 60% of materials by weight were delivered to Olympic Park by rail or water transport.

Nearly 2Mt of contaminated soil was cleaned for reuse on the Olympic Park site in the UK’s largest ever soil-washing program.

Olympic Park sports venues will use 56% less potable water than equivalent buildings. New energy infrastructure will help achieve 50% reduction in carbon emissions from permanent buildings at the main site. An onsite concrete batching plant supplied low-carbon concrete to all contractors. Embodied carbon on the Olympic Park site was reduced by 85,000t by using design optimisation, recycled aggregates and an average cement substitution of 32%. The roof truss of the Olympic Stadium is made of unwanted gas pipelines. More than 100ha of open space has been created and designed to reduce the risk of flooding and enrich biodiversity in the Lower Lea Valley.

ODA appointed Atkins as the official engineering design services provider. Atkins director Mike McNicholas said: “As designers we were stimulated by the commitments ODA made ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA | APRIL 2012

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COVER STORY – London Olympics

The main stadium was designed and built by the Team Stadium consortium, consisting of Sir Robert McAlpine, Populous, Buro Happold and Hyland Edgar Driver. The top ring of the stadium was built using surplus gas pipes; a visual testament to London 2012’s “reduce, reuse, recycle” approach to sustainability. Steel and concrete use was further reduced by designing the lower section of the stadium to sit within a bowl in the ground.

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COVER STORY – London Olympics

to sustainability. The biggest risk was what was in the ground and our challenge was to remediate [all this soil in] the park.”

Designers were forced to think about the landform and the site’s end use, as well as about the potential and appropriate reuse of as much of the material as possible, McNicholas explained at the Learning Legacy launch. They needed to think how that could be integrated into the design, and how it all could come together in the construction process.

“The basics of civil engineering were driven and delivered through commitments to sustainability,” he said.

Details about the sustainability embedded in the soil treatment program are revealed in a Learning Legacy paper about the geotechnical enabling works used to maximise reuse within the Olympic Park site boundary. ODA project sponsor Jan Hellings, Atkins enabling works project manager Martyn Lass, enabling works, earthworks and remediation design lead James Apted and enabling works deputy project manager (remediation) Ian Mead authored the paper.

They said the ODA adopted an onsite treatment approach to maximise the quantity of excavated material that could be suitable for fill. The treatment of contaminated soil was carried out in two “soil hospitals”. These hospitals received all soil for testing, then processed, treated and blended the soil to engineering grade material, thereby saving on quarry imports.

“For soil washing, five plants were procured to treat around 700,000m3 of soil out of the total earthworks of 2,000,000m3,” Hellings et al said. “They used physiochemical technology to remove a wide range of contaminants including organics such as petroleum and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and inorganics such as heavy metals, arsenic and cyanides. For soils with leachable contaminants, chemical stabilisation was carried out ex situ in a pugmill using proprietary and specialised reagents.”

Sustainability also drove the main stadium design, where the scope was to design a stadium to meet the 80,000 person capacity during the Olympics, and reduce this down to 25,000 person capacity after the event.

Team Stadium was appointed in April 2008 as the integrated design and construction team. It consisted of Sir Robert McAlpine (main contractor), Buro Happold (engineer), Populous (architect) and Hyland Edgar Driver (landscape architect). The ICE Learning Legacy paper “Delivering London 2012: the Olympic Stadium” was presented by ODA project sponsor Ian Crockford, Sir Robert McAlpine project manager Mike Breton, Buro Happold engineering leader Fergus McCormick and Populous project architect Philip Johnson.

In the paper the authors explained how the final concept employs a lower elliptical bowl dug into the site with a capacity of 25,000 persons, with a lightweight temporary, raked single tier structure to provide an additional 55,000 seats.

In a clever use of supports, “all upper tier terracing can be removed, leaving a series of columns at podium level that will take a roof structure appropriate for a 25,000 capacity legacy athletic stadium,” Crockford et al wrote.

In the Aquatics Centre, an impressive 11,000m2 wave-form roof is supported by just two concrete cores to the north and a 22m wall to the south. The structural design of the building and

the challenges faced are detailed in “Delivering London 2012: the Aquatics Centre” by Crockford and another ODA project sponsor John Nicholson, CLM project manager Malcolm Nelson, London Aquatics Centre project director Stuart Fraser and Arup project design director for structural concrete Gordon Mungal.

The authors said that in sustainability-driven initiatives on this project, “over 150,000t of concrete was poured using an innovative mix of 40% cement replacement and up to 76% recycled aggregate, resulting in significant savings in embodied carbon dioxide”. The Aquatics Centre team was the first onsite to push beyond 50% coarse aggregate substitution and the first to pour visible concrete using the recycled material.

With respect to the cement replacement, the paper revealed: “Numerous trials were undertaken to establish the maximum ground granulated blast-furnace slag cement substitution that could be achieved while still maintaining a high-class concrete finish. A 40% cement substitution was settled on for the highspecification visible concrete, with other elements of visible superstructure poured with 55% and 70% substitutions.”

Delivering a community energy network Central to powering the Olympic Park site, an energy centre was built early in the construction program and started operations in October 2010. The components within the energy centre help the ODA deliver its strategy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50% compared with comparable use of a similar site built to 2006 building regulations standards. The centre has been designed to not only deliver “low-carbon” heating and cooling across the site for the games, but also for new buildings and communities after 2012.

In the early days of the program, the ODA determined that the best approach to procure the infrastructure would be to offer all services through long-term concession contracts.

In a timely coincidence, an adjoining new urban development under way at Stratford was also looking at its energy needs and the developers were pursuing similar low-carbon goals and strategies.

The ODA and Stratford City joined concepts to come up with an extensive district network connected by two energy centres.

These energy centres included combined cooling, heating and power (trigeneration CCHP), a district heating network with low flow and return temperatures, and very large storage tanks.

The contract for the private finance, design, build and operation of the district heating and cooling network and associated energy centres was awarded to Cofely, a subsidiary of GDF Suez, under a 40-year concession.

The principal elements of equipment in each energy centre are: • 3.3MWe spark ignition gas engine cooling, heat and power units with two-stage exhaust gas heat recovery • 20MWth dual fuel-fired hot water boilers • 4MWth two-stage adsorption chiller • 7MWth electric chillers using ammonia as the refrigerant • open evaporative cooling towers • thermal stores (750m3 heat and cool stores at Olympic Park, and 200m3 heat store at Stratford) • treated water storage (750m3 Olympic Park, and 250m3 Stratford)

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COVER STORY – London Olympics

COVER STORY – London Olympics

(Bottom left) The Velodrome has been designed with an energy efficiency improvement of 31% over building regulations. It is the most energy efficient venue in the Olympic Park and has set new standards for buildings of this type.

Expedition was the structural engineer, Hopkins the architect, ISG the contractor and BDSP the services engineer. (Middle left) On the Aquatics Centre, designers learnt that it is still possible to make a significant energy efficiency improvement even at late stages in the design process.

Suppliers were Zaha Hadid as architect, Balfour Beatty as contractor, and Arup as structural engineer as well as building services engineer. (Top left) The Basketball Arena is the largest ever temporary venue built for any Olympic Games.

Around 20,000m2 of recyclable white PVC membrane has been stretched over three different variations of arched panels on the frame of the structure. The design team consisted of Sinclair Knight Merz, Nussli International, Wilkinson Eyre and KSS Design Group, while the principal contractor was CLM BBA. (Top) The Olympic Village has 2818 new apartments in 11 residential plots, complete with courtyards, gardens and balconies. It has been developed by Lend Lease.

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• 3MWth biomass boilers (Olympic Park only, bio-oil used at Stratford).

Details of the energy infrastructure established and some of the important decisions made are revealed in a Learning Legacy paper titled “Providing community energy for the London 2012 Olympic Park” by ODA project sponsor Ruari Maybank, Cofely technical director Mike Carr, Buro Happold group director Ian Guest and Arup director Bruce Laidlow.

The Olympic Park energy centre has been built to allow for the installation of additional plant as the site is developed after the Olympic Games. Combining the potential existing in both energy centres, the authors said the system can ultimately provide “200MW of heating, 64MW of cooling and 30MW of low-carbon electricity”.

The district heating and cooling network involved the laying of over 16km of heating and 2km of cooling pipes, and the system has been designed with capacity to cater for future users. The network of insulated piping, ranging from 50mm to 700mm diameter, is connected to over 40 heating and 20 cooling substations, carrying water at a rate up to 400L/s. This may be increased to more than 1000L/s after the games.

The authors explained the benefits of the community network: “This part of east London was the blank canvas of an entirely

new development. The community energy network provides improved fuel efficiency and increased reliability of supply. By centralising the supply of heating and cooling, lifecycle costs for venues and buildings will be reduced and, in the absence of the need for chimneys and cooling towers, greater architectural flexibility applied.”

To see a lecture on this go to http://tv.theiet.org/.

Testing the advanced communications and technology With the ODA seeking to deliver “the most digitally enabled games ever”, a number of tests and trials of the communications and technology systems have been crucial to ensuring the capability of the system is sufficient for the 10.8 million people expected to visit the area over the course of the games.

In a lecture delivered at the IET in January, as part of the Learning Legacy program, titled “Technology for the Olympic Park – Systems integration and telecommunications”, ODA head of systems and technology Gordon Shipley explained the wide variety of communications systems that went into the Olympic Park site: “The site requires IT (servers, networks, desktops; equipment rooms; cable containment and pathways);

ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA | APRIL 2012

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COVER STORY – London Olympics

The Olympic Stadium shines in the London skyline ahead of hosting the XXXth Olympiad.

telecommunications; security and safety; building management; command and control; facilities management; and mechanical and electrical systems control.

“Several site-wide systems had to be designed before the venue designs were even started. These included telecoms ducting to support public communications; Games communications, broadcast and government communications systems; and the associated electrical distribution networks.”

Around 80 separate projects in the ICT sector had separate design and build contracts, which then required system integration by the ODA. “What we needed was a system that was built fit-for-purpose and then we had to assure it. The requirements of integration were established early and then applied to the scopes of work.

After guaranteeing the scope was delivered, we then had to stress test the system,” Shipley explained.

He discussed the contractors’ test facility designed and operated by Honeywell for the integration process. During the stress testing process Honeywell introduced software and any patches to assure integration.

“All of these systems have been tested, and the test facility is a crucial part of ensuring the integration works,” he said.

Testing facilities and trials were also vital for examining mobile data demand in the stadiums. Mobile network operators are aiming to deliver world class mobile services across the park, deploying 2G in the 900MHz and 1800MHz and 3G in the 900MHz and 2100MHz spectrum bands. The operators are seeing customer expectations rise with increased functionality

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on smartphones, and in terms of traffic demand anticipate a ten-fold increase above 2010 levels.

In a paper within the Institution of Engineering and Technology special interest publication Delivering London 2012: ICT enabling the games, titled “Delivering London 2012: meeting the mobile demand challenge” by radio design engineer Dave Fraley, principal radio engineer D Sanderson and principal engineer Dr Stuart Mitchell, the authors describe a number of trials, including one at Twickenham Stadium in 2010 which helped develop the design concept and implementation methodology widely adopted for the London Olympic venues.

The Twickenham trial provided empirical measurements for a 3D planning tool. This tool was used to model and design the Aquatic Centre venue in particular, where mobile network engineers were facing installation design difficulties because construction work was preventing onsite radio frequency carrier wave testing.

Fraley et al said the trial was important “to validate the design and optimise philosophies well ahead of the games”, and this was one of their key lessons.

“London 2012 has provided operators with a unique opportunity to plan for a mass GSM and 3G event, dominated by smartphone and new device classes,” Fraley et al said. “It positions the UK as a leading global centre for event and stadia design.” n