MB Medical Center

Project Background

The MB Medical Center in Winter Haven, FL is a two-story, 16,000 sq ft healthcare facility serving central Florida. This was completed in 2021 as part of a medical group dedicated to bringing quality care to the community. As a medical center, MB Medical Center embodies key characteristics typical of such facilities. It boasts a dedicated medical staff, including physicians, nurses, specialists, and administrative professionals, trained to offer a wide array of medical services. The facility is outfitted with state-of-the-art medical technologies and equipment, including advanced imaging machines, laboratory facilities, and electronic health record (EHR) systems. Its accessibility ensures that the local community can easily access healthcare services.

"RISA customer service is still the best I've ever experienced in any industry, any place in the world!"

— Shayah Smiley, PE

About the Structure

MB Medical Center features CMU walls, steel moment frames, and concrete over steel deck floors, designed to ensure structural integrity. Notably, the interior structural components were minimized during design to allow for maximum future renovation potential if needed. Pre-engineered roof trusses were specified for the project. There was minimal space for shear walls due to the required open floor plan, so concrete piers and steel columns were used to create "hybrid" frames. There was a challenge to create a foundation modification that required a thickened slab redesign at one of the foundations.

How Were RISA Products Utilized?

Smiley Structural Engineering fully exploited the integration capability between RISAFloor, RISA-3D, RISAFoundation, and RISAConnection to easily transfer forces and loading between the gravity model in RISAFloor, to the lateral design in RISA-3D and finally on to the foundation model in RISAFoundation. Placeholder members were used in RISAFloor to represent the project’s pre-engineered roof trusses. RISA-3D was then utilized for the lateral design including specific consideration for the “hybrid” frames, which consisted of beams that were fixed to the steel columns and pinned to the concrete piers for lateral support in the transverse direction. The longitudinal direction utilized CMU shear walls to resist the lateral forces on the structure. Next, RISAFoundation was used to analyze the perimeter and interior foundations. To create the foundation modifications and redesigns, RISAFoundation had the ability to quickly create additional nodes and edit existing node coordinates manually, simplifying model changes. Finally, RISAConnection was utilized to analyze and design the moment connections using loading directly from RISA-3D.