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The new San Mames Stadium, recently awarded in the World Architecture Festival as the best Sports building completed in 2015, is the new home of football team Athletic Club of Bilbao. After the new stadium was finished, IDOM was commissioned by the Club to assess potential upgrades in the roof with the aim of improving the spectators’ comfort on rainy days. The selected solution, the erection of a cable-roof extension which increases the roof spans by 13–23m, was eventually carried out during the summer break of 2016. This paper describes the assessment process carried out by IDOM, focusing on the 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of wind flow and Wind-Driven Rain (WDR) for the original stadium roof and for different roof alternatives. The performance of each potential alternative is evaluated and compared under different rain events. The wind-flow patterns are determined by steady-state RANS simulations, whereas the WDR trajectories are estimated by means of Lagrangian particle tracking. Field measurements of wind velocities and wetting patterns on the stands were also taken during the whole assessment process in order to correlate the results obtained from the CFD analyses. Furthermore, some wind tunnel testing were also performed in parallel in order to assess, in a qualitative way, the effects of each potential alternative on the wind-flow patterns and compare them with the CFD results.

The Canada France Hawaii Telescope Corporation (CFHT) plans to repurpose its observatory on the summit of Maunakea and operate a new wide field spectroscopic survey telescope, the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE). MSE will upgrade the observatory with a larger 11.25m aperture telescope and equip it with dedicated instrumentation to capitalize on the site, which has some of the best seeing in the northern hemisphere, and offer its user community the ability to do transformative science. The knowledge and experience of the current CFHT staff will contribute greatly to the engineering of this new facility. MSE will reuse the same building and telescope pier as CFHT. However, it will be necessary to upgrade the support pier to accommodate a bigger telescope and replace the current dome since a wider slit opening of 12.5 meters in diameter is needed. Once the project is completed the new facility will be almost indistinguishable on the outside from the current CFHT observatory. MSE will build upon CFHT's pioneering work in remote operations, with no staff at the observatory during the night, and use modern technologies to reduce daytime maintenance work. This paper describes the design approach for redeveloping the CFHT facility for MSE including the infrastructure and equipment considerations required to support and facilitate nighttime observations. The building will be designed so existing equipment and infrastructure can be reused wherever possible while meeting new requirement demands. Past experience and lessons learned will be used to create a modern, optimized, and logical layout of the facility. The purpose of this paper is to provide information to readers involved in the MSE project or organizations involved with the redevelopment of an existing observatory facility for a new mission., 23 pages; Proceedings of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2018; Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems VII

The E-ELT as a whole could be classified as an extremely challenging project. More precisely, it should be defined as an array of many different sub-challenges, which comprise technical, logistical and managerial matters. This paper reviews some of these critical challenges, in particular those related to the Dome and the Main Structure, suggesting ways to face them in the most pragmatic way possible. Technical challenges for the Dome and the Main Structure are mainly related to the need to upscale current design standards to an order of magnitude larger design. Trying a direct design escalation is not feasible; it would not work. A design effort is needed to cross hybridize current design standards with technologies coming from other different applications. Innovative design is therefore not a wish but a must. And innovative design comes along with design risk. Design risk needs to be tackled from two angles: on the one hand through thorough design validation analysis and on the other hand through extensive pre-assembly and testing. And, once again, full scale integrated pre-assembly and testing of extremely large subsystems is not always possible. Therefore, defining a comprehensive test plan for critical components, critical subsystems and critical subassemblies becomes essential. Logistical challenges are linked to the erection site. Cerro Armazones is a remote site and this needs to be considered when evaluating transport and erection requirements. But it is not only the remoteness of the site that needs to be considered. The size of both Dome and Main Structure require large construction cranes and a well defined erection plan taking into account pre-assembly strategies, limited plan area utilization, erection sequence, erection stability during intermediate stages and, very specifically, efficient coordination between the Dome and the Main Structure erection processes. Managerial issues pose another set of challenges in this project. Both the size of the project and its special technical characteristics require specific managerial skills. Due to the size of the project it becomes essential to effectively manage and integrate a large number of suppliers and fabricators, of very different nature and geographically distributed. Project management plans need to cope with this situation. Also, extensive on site activities require intensive on site organization in line with large construction management strategies. Finally, the technical edge of the project requires deep technical understanding at management level in order to be able to take sound strategic decisions throughout the project in terms of the overall project quality, cost and schedule.

As a continuation of the Preliminary Design of the Dome for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) proposed by IDOM, the Detail Design for the E-ELT Dome has been developed with the objective of optimizing the design to minimize the manufacturing, erection and operation costs. The proposed design is based on a hemispherical dome tightly fitted to the dome design volume to minimize the enclosed volume and consequently the cost. The large observing slit, large as compared to the dome diameter, is covered by means of two horizontal biparting doors. This paper summarizes the most significative changes in the design and the approach followed by IDOM for the detailed design process, with emphasis in the construction process. The design work presented in this paper has been performed under contract with the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The baseline design for the enclosure of the E-ELT is based on a spherical dome concept. This dome is tightly fitted to the TRV so that its surface, the enclosed volume and consequently the system overall cost are minimized. The large slit that is required for observation-as compared to the enclosure volume-, much larger than in smaller telescopes, poses a big challenge to the design. This affects the slit covering system design, for which dynamic issues must be carefully considered in order to prevent operation problems, as well as the dome structure and other mechanisms such as the windscreen and the crane, that have to cover a large 45m span. This paper presents a design that solves all these difficulties in both a cost-effective and reliable way. The design work presented in this paper has been performed under contract with the European Southern Observatory.