OPTUM CS: the next generation structural design software paving the way to carbon v

CO₂ emissions from the production of building materials account for 11% of global emissions. Whilst traditional design methods help to ensure safer structures, they also require much more material (concrete and steel) than is necessary. It makes constructions overly expensive and represents a serious hurdle towards buildings with a reduced carbon footprint. The concrete industry is developing new more sustainable products, but these are expensive and thus unattractive to the construction industry who is already struggling to reduce costs. These challenges are widely acknowledged among experienced engineers who, while acknowledging that current methods lead to unsatisfactory design, have no real alternatives. OPTUM Concrete Solution (OPTUM CS) for the design of reinforced concrete structures can achieve up to 40% material savings and a 50% reduction in the use of engineering hours. The project will enable a reduction of computational time from 15-30 minutes to seconds by using a solver in a multi-core environment and cloud computing for multiple load combinations in parallel, and provide full integration with common BIM packages to remove hurdles between architects and engineers.