Public Funding for Steel Construction Institute(The)

"This project aims to improve construction sector productivity through the use of offsite manufactured integrated steel modules and will help meet government objectives to reduce onsite construction time, increase construction productivity, improve safety on construction sites and address onsite skills shortages. Steel is the original offsite framing material with up to 90% of structural steelwork already manufactured offsite. This project will provide the steel construction supply chain with the knowledge, confidence and incentives to take the transformational step of including integrated offsite steel modules into the design, manufacture and construction of mainstream steel framed buildings. The project will develop and publish, in a free online guide, design prototypes that can be used by engineers, main contractors, steelwork contractors, M&E contractors and others to design, manufacture and construct mainstream steel framed buildings that include integrated offsite steel modules. This will drive the rapid take up of integrated offsite steel modules and increase the rate of offsite manufacturing and assembly in the mainstream steel building market."

The project team is Ellis and Moore, Cleveland Steel and Tubes, Steel Construction Institute and Cullinan Studio, led by the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products. The National Federation of Demolition Contractors, UCL Institute of Sustainable Resources and University of Cambridge have all offered expertise. It aims to overcome barriers to steel re-use and kick-start a market in five to ten years of 25kT per year, 10% of current UK scrap arising, with a value of £12.5m. Steel re-use has 4% impact of new steel (BRE: 2004), offers cost benefits and job creation. Circular economy principles indicates the building is no longer the end product. Instead, the built environment can be viewed as a rolling infrastructure of products; this demands a new approach to the design of buildings. By designing first for deconstruction and re-use, it is essential that architects, engineers and deconstruction/ salvage experts communicate; currently they are at either end of a linear supply chain. This project will develop a plan for a value network to address this and develop business models for Cleveland Steel and Tubes and ASBP to operate in this new market.

Research has shown that there are significant greenhouse gas emissions to be saved through the efficient design of structural steel frames, however, this will have implications on project costs - the minimisation of which is often the primary driver of construction projects. This innovative project thus seeks to understand the trade-offs between the cost and carbon efficiency of the design and fabrication of steel frames, whilst also investigating the knock-on effects this optimisation has on whole life performance aspects, such as robustness, vibration performance, operational energy, deconstructability and material reuse. This project will enable the consortium partners to offer an enhanced service that optimises the cost and carbon of steel frames, facilitating client procurement of buildings with minimised whole life impacts. There are wide ranging benefits of the study across social, economic and environmental factors, and these could start to be seen by the end of this two project as the work is applied to commercial projects.

The objective of this project is to encourage widespread reuse of structural steel in the UK through improved coordination and information exchange along the construction supply chain. Currently only 5% of structural steel is reused, but reusing steel leads to significant energy and emissions savings compared to the common practice of recycling steel. By coordinating information from designers and demolition contractors, the supply and demand of reused steel can be matched, leading to the deconstruction and reuse of buildings compared to traditional destructive demolition. This in turn, will lead to reduced embodied emissions impacts, cost savings and the development of a new UK market supporting steel reuse. This project will examine the practical and economic feasibility of establishing an on-line information portal through which the supply and demand of reused steel are mapped to stimulate a reused structural steel market.

Composite steel-concrete (SC) modular construction comprises panels of two steel plates with a concrete infill assembled into modules. SC modules are being used in new nuclear power plant (NPP) to considerably shorten construction time and improve quality using offsite fabrication. However, there are still problems associated with construction of SC modules. In particular, existing methods of joining the plates together, joining panels together and joining modules to foundations have numerous shortcomings. This project will, at a realistic scale, provide proof of concept of a new technique (“Steel Bricks”) to build SC modules whilst overcoming the problems associated with existing techniques. The project will involve the design and construction of a scaled diesel generation building, supported by workshop trials, material tests and quality assessment. There will also be significant engagement with key stakeholders throughout the project. The project builds on a 2011 TSB feasibility which explored design and construction of SC modules in NPP. It will create a significant opportunity for SME fabricators to participate in the civil nuclear supply chain.

SCI has a membership in excess of 400 companies and individuals and is the leading independent provider of technical expertise and disseminator of best practice to the steel construction sector. To facilitate this activity SCI developed Steelbiz at the start of this millennium, an (at the time) innovative on-line technical information system for use of the UK construction industry with the aid of UK government funding. The relevance of this initiative is even greater today than it was, with industry switching from hard copy information and growing demand for a wider volume and variety of information provided electronically and available on an ever increasing number of platforms and utilisable in a variety of ways. For the construction industry this changing need for how information is presented is compounded by the need to adopt Eurocodes. The on-going migration to these pan European design standards, which are replacing the former BS documents, is presenting industry with an unprecedented need for readily accessible information and advice. Discussions with our members over the past two years have revealed that whilst Steelbiz contains an ever expanding body of useful information from technical publications through to advisory notes and guidance for specific engineering problems, amounting to over 5000 individual items, users would like to be able to manage and have available exactly what they want, where they want it. The aim of this project is to use our expertise in engineering and software to explore with our members innovative options for on demand, managed information provision. The project will provide quality assured information from Steelbiz and present it directly to users in a range of ways. These could include pushing requested information directly to member company intranets, and to mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary

Awaiting Public Summary