The glass and curtain wall industry is now applying Building Information Modeling technology rapidly to participate and survive on their projects. The glazing system suppliers and contract glaziers will provide dedicated and knowledgeable BIM services and emerge as a highly valued specially contractor before 2015.
In fact, the Glass Association of North America’s (GANA) Building Envelope Contractor’s (BEC) division is engaged for intriguing steps to train the industry ready for BIM.
Technical Glass Products America is now applying BIM technology for creating models of its products and publishing. The firm has now modeled its full line of fire-rated glazing products, framing systems, steel curtain wall, doors and windows including products, for instance, the Pilkington Profilit channel glass.
Contract glazing firm ‘Trainor Glass Co.’ has also modeled several custom impact glass curtainwall systems successfully.
A large numbers of building products companies as well as curtain wall manufacturers, glass fabricators and component suppliers are creating their products in BIM and making BIM libraries for future application. This system will also provide assistance to building products companies for making their position better for getting architectural specification.
BIM will create a new collaborative IPD contracting form as this 3D modeling software will permit planners, designers, manufacturers, contractors, glazing subcontractors and owners to work from the similar object-related database.
With IPD and more design build, glass fabricators get the ability to inherit the design progression and support the BIM model as shop drawings. “Instead of the architects creating one set of models and the fabricators creating another set from that, they’re creating one set to meet both needs,” said EcoBuild America speaker Diane Davis.
Glass fabricators have the opportunity “to create virtual model catalogs, so their products work as little BIM sub-models that carry the manufacturers’ data, energy data and carbon footprint data,” Davis said. “These can be downloaded by architects and designers for their model.” “Fabricators should not create files for all the BIM programs as they did with CAD, but create their program with the IFC, or Industry Foundation Classes, an international open standard for BIM” she said.
“A standard glass manufacturer probably wouldn’t be interested in BIM, but would focus on green efforts and energy conservation” said EcoBuild America speaker Diane Davis, president, AEC Infosystems Inc., Baltimore. “Especially in today’s cap and trade scenario, if the glass manufacturers show the energy efficiency offset in the production of glass, it could become a green matrix within the industry and get connected with the green standards, like Energy Star and LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] credits. That’s where the manufacturer would be asked for his input, which in turn would become part of the BIM data.”
Besides creating 3D models the BIM process can provide many vital information which will be very useful for glazing system suppliers and contract glaziers - wind loads, wind tunnel tests, structural live load movement requirements, material finishes, glass type, interlayer type, allowable deflection on framing systems, light transmission, thermal information, curtain wall profiles, test criteria, drift
and earthquake requirements, sound transmission, fabrication part numbers, installation schedules, and field inspection data.
BIM can be applied to store and evaluate field record of glass and curtain wall data in an instinctive model which facilitates easy and smooth cost analysis of the glass for the owners and that hyperlink to field report documents. This feature permits BIM models to work as a 3D Web page of a building that connects to documents, plans, sketches and photographs.
BIM provides sustainable design by creating greater energy efficiency including thermal and structural analyses. The Glazing contractors will get the benefits to develop more sophisticated curtain wall systems.
With BIM model the glazing contractors can fix up fabrication and fit-up issues virtually and resolve it before built physically. This will also lead to diminish the misuse in time, material, field labor and enhance trade coordination with on-site materials.
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