Description: Home of the Houston Texans, Reliant Stadium was the first in the NFL with a retractable roof when it opened in September 2002. Reliant Stadium has a capacity of around 69,000, in three main tiers of seats that enclose the field. The roof consists of two sections that meet over the 50-yard line when it is closed.
In February 2000, the Hirschfeld Steel Company awarded Dowco the contract to detail the new stadium’s roof. Total weight of this project is approximately 12,500 Tons and it was one of the most challenging our company has undertaken
The roof is comprised of ten Inverted Retractable Triangular Trusses (5 tied together on each side of center and complete with a brow on each outside truss). Each truss is approximately 18’-0 wide x 30’-0 deep, spanning 385 feet and is supported by bogeys that run along a rail at the top chord of the two Super Trusses. The two Super Trusses are over 900 feet long, 36 feet wide at the top chord and only 10 feet wide at the curved bottom chord, with the depth always varying along the length. This posed some interesting problems in that there was no constant plane for any of the vertical steel. Four Built-up Plate Columns 60” wide x 18” deep x 75’ -0 tall supported these trusses at each end.
Employing Tekla Structures 3D software to do the modeling and detailing was invaluable. We were able to lay out the steel using x, y, z co-ordinate geometry (which would have been almost impossible using a 2D system or manual drafting), and generate Advance Bills for ordering especially difficult to obtain beam sizes or grades of material, prior to detailing. We were also able to split the project into several models, enabling us to have people working on different areas at the same time.
Dowco produced over 8000 drawings for this project. It was a great Dowco team effort from our cell leaders to our programmers, modelers, connectors, detailers and checkers.
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