Wembley National Football Stadium is the centre stage for English football and the dominant building structure in North West London. Rising over the stadium is a 1,490 tonne steel tubular lattice arch which is used to support the roof of the stadium. DLT were responsible for the conceptual and detailed design of the erection systems, steelwork connections and build pre-camber/pre-tension for all the 26,000 tonnes of steel used in the stadium, including the stands, cable supported roof and arch structures. We were also responsible for strand jacking operations carried out on the site, including the roll-up of the arch.

The arch has a span of 315m and a height of 133m. It was fabricated offsite in 21m long, 100 tonne sections, and then brought to site for assembly at ground level. Once complete the whole arch was rotated into final position using strand jacks, as shown below. The total weight of the arch, cables and temporary works that were rotated from the assembly angle of 1.63 degrees through to the final angle of 112 degrees was 2,831 tonnes. 20 No 418 te capacity strand jacks were used on the pulling side and 5 No 580 tonne capacity strand jacks were used on the restraining side.

The detailed design of connections proved quite a challenge, many requiring finite element analysis to verify our manual calculations. An example of one such complex node is shown below. This node is in the roof and connects the roof cable members.