The Wave – Coventry

Project Brief

MIDFIX was pleased to be part of the project team to work on a prestigious £36.7m water park, The Wave in Coventry. The brief was simple: we were given a 3D model of the water park, and we were required to design and engineer pipe supports that could be fixed to the current slide support structure.

The Wave opened in the Summer of 2020, the water park has 9 slides including the Navigator, which is a roller coaster with both uphill and downhill drops in a tube.

Solution

Where do you start when asked to support multiple large pipework runs amidst a maze of slides and steelwork in a water park?

Designing and engineering a series of frames that would support the intricate twisting and turning pipe runs, whilst both avoiding some and connecting to other existing secondary supports, was always going to be a challenge! Our senior CAD engineer discusses how these complexities were overcome.

Due to the elaborate slide design, their secondary support structure was complicated at best, and it had to support each of our frames off it. This involved hundreds of bespoke components and specialised clamps, which had to be fabricated in our workshop, galvanised, and painted before sending to site, once again proving early engagement is critical in order to keep within construction time frames.

Then came the next challenge: the design had to be suitable for installation in such a limited space. It soon became clear that a modular solution was the only way forward, which led us to Sikla Framo, as it was already galvanised, and provided high strength whilst offering a significant weight saving over traditional steel.  This was used in conjunction with an HDG channel system to provide a complete solution.

Another challenge was to ensure the design could cope with the dynamic forces from the water flowing through the pipes, especially as at every point it changed direction. The Framo system made this simpler, as bracing could be added as required and fixed with one of our bespoke connection brackets back to the structure.

As a final step, every component had to have a secondary coating, white paint, or powder coat, due to the high corrosivity of the chlorinated air that would be surrounding the frames. Along with a dedicated cleaning routine, this provided peace of mind to the client and a suitable design life.

Structural calculations included connections analysis, water pressure/thrust, and service loads which verified the overall structural stability of our design. All forces, deflections, and stresses were based on Eurocode 3.

The support frame was part assembled in our dedicated workshop facility, following months of design and calculations, and rapidly installed on-site.

We were pleased to support such a prestigious water park and to be able to overcome both the obvious and not-so-obvious challenges with our technical solutions.

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