ENR 2024 Top 25 Newsmakers
Dale Sinclair: Delivers on the Promise of Industrialized Construction at England's Manchester Airport — and Beyond
_ENRready.webp?t=1737070943)
Contractor Mace was confident it could deliver Manchester Airport nodes in a condensed time but needed Dale Sinclair and WSP to provide design models with manufacturing-level tolerances to realize its goals.
Photo courtesy of WSP
Related Article:
Only Some Assembly Required: A Kit-of-Parts Approach to Construction
Back to:
25 Top Newsmakers
Design firm WSP and U.K.-based contractor Mace Group have pioneered an industrialized construction method that has now delivered nodes and fixed links for a new airport concourse at England’s Manchester Airport that will expand capacity by adding 12 new gates. The kit-of-parts approach extends beyond a normal use of prefabrication and provides a level of detail usually reserved for manufacturing tolerances.
“One of the biggest challenges has been that people think they know what ‘kit-of-parts’ is,” says Dale Sinclair, head of digital innovation at WSP. “We have been designing elements for years now. We’ve got unitized facade systems. We bring steel frames in as components.” But the biggest challenge is “a lot of people think they’ve been doing that and you have to explain to them [that] this is quite different,” he adds.
The Kit-of-Parts Approach
WSP has developed its kit-of-parts approach as a program-level design management process that combines customized offsite manufacturing with design for manufacturing and assembly workflow (DfMA). Autodesk has helped the firm on the initiative, with Az Jasat, its senior manager for industrialized construction, assisting to implement technology such as the Inventor-to-Revit workflow.
The process lets design teams balance the use of various construction methods and design technologies, breaking down building designs into larger components that can be manufactured offsite at more precise tolerances before being transported to the site for rapid assembly.
“To support this kit-of-parts-based approach, the level of detail that they needed to show in their design because of all the detailed interfaces, almost a nuts-and-bolts and washer level of detail, required a product like Inventor to actually produce that data,” Jasat says.
Ultimately, that data “found its way into Revit, and into the hands of their delivery subcontractors, supply chain members and Mace,” adds Jasat, who also helped the team use Autodesk Construction Cloud and other tools to manage the project.
In all, the airport nodes used just 67 unique parts in its kit rather than thousands of components. Sinclair was able to shepherd the design side of the project while also training engineers to think about manufacturing, delivery and other aspects of each part in a cohesive fashion, and to envision how they might eventually fit together on site.
Looking for quick answers on construction and engineering topics?
Try Ask ENR, our new smart AI search tool.
Ask ENR →
The Manchester Airport kit-of-parts includes installation of 150 precast concrete pilings for foundations to support the concourse, as well as steel node structures, a stairway, an elevator core to allow passengers to change levels between plane and gate, light-gauge steel for the exterior enclosure and steel and glass supports. All pieces were transported to the site in flatbed trucks from U.K.-based manufacturers via special airport delivery to expedite their arrival, while maintaining security protocols.
“You’ve really got to design the details to suit [construction] sequencing,” says Sinclair. “That’s probably been our main learning point, how to get much slicker at sequencing and the whole lifting [via crane] piece of the installation.”
Mace estimates that the kit-of-parts approach has shortened the project schedule by 83,000 worker-hours and saved about 125 tons of carbon dioxide emissions compared to a more traditional delivery schedule and sequencing.
This story was updated March 5 to reflect to proper location of the airport.
