With the new light for the Conference Room at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, engineeria faced an exciting challenge: to carry out the analysis and design of a new light to be supported by the existing suspended light.
Due to an increase in the number of seats at the conference table, the existing conference room light was intended to be upgraded by the addition of a new internal ring light.
Designing a structure not supported by a building or a wall, was a one of a kind task for engineeria’s team. The scheme involved: assessing the capacity of the existing structure considering the addition of the inner light, strengthening/re-designing of the existing light structural elements as well as the design of the new structure for the inner light.
The existing light is suspended from the ceiling of the conference room by 12 vertical cables and the new light has been connected to the existing light by cables.
The profile of the light is a channel section which carries the services and bulbs and is covered by a top plate, this can be seen in Figure 5. The vertical cables are attached to the channel profile through a welded internal channel. The cables are connected to the internal channel by the means of a pin connection.
Engineeria proposed a new ring with a similar channel section to the existing aluminium light.
Engineeria’s team gave free rein to their creativity to analyse the weights and structural dynamics involved in this project. The team built a cardboard model that reproduced the weights to understand tension forces to the cable and control the deflection adjusting the cable lengths.
The new inner ring was connected to the outer ring by introducing new cables. In order to avoid imposing unnecessary torsions into either light structure, the cables were connected to others cables directly at the pin connection point so that the weight of the services and lights themselves are applied directly to the cables.
The result was an additional structure that harmoniously integrated with the previous one.