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Project Details

Fabric 1

Flexlight Xtrem TX30-Type III
Producer/Manufacturer: Serge Ferrari North America Inc.
Primary Use: Main Fabric

Engineer Company 1
GLR Engineers

Design Company
Uni-Systems, LLC

Architect Company
Perkins & Will

Fabrication Company
Lightweight Manufacturing

Project Manager Company
Uni-Systems, LLC

Installation Company
BR Fabrication; Center Glass

Please describe the project specifications

Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital needed an operable awning product to shade their Aquatic Center therapy pool and protect their patients from the Southern California sun. The architects at Perkins and Will specified our En-Fold retractable fabric awning system measuring 56’-10” in extension by 41’-5 1/2” wide, affording 2,387 square feet of pool deck coverage from sun and rain.

The architects designed the En-Fold® retractable canopy system to have no pitch to the primary support beams for aesthetic and therapy pool overhead clearance reasons. To achieve this, we configured the En-Fold canopy as a unique “flat” system which features three horizontal drive beams, with the center drive beam being at a slightly higher elevation than the two outer ones. A plurality of fabric beams slope down at a pitch of one-half inch per foot from a gently radiused center apex to shed rainwater off the sides instead of the end. This unique design required extra analysis to ensure that no ponding would occur at the gently radiused center section of the fabric panels.

To achieve the gentle radius at the center section of the fabric beams the extrusions were sent to a company that specializes in the precise rolling of steel and aluminum profiles. The rolling company needed to use extra care to not deform the keder grooves in the aluminum extrusions. The aluminum extrusions were brought back to our shop where each keder groove was tested to ensure that the fabric panels would pull through without difficulty and any extrusion that failed the test was scrapped and new sections were sent to the rolling company for processing until we had the required number of acceptable pieces.

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