How can SCIT help you?
Here at SCIT we are passionate about designing safe and efficient structures. We are happy to offer advice and guidance at any point in a structure’s lifecycle, from the tendering stage, to detailed design, through construction as well as being able to offer assistance diagnosing failures.
Using our unique software developed in house, we can rapidly model any clad steel structure, including the cladding, down to the last fastener. The high in-plane stiffness of the cladding can dramatically alter the load paths when compared to traditional design models; only by including the cladding can the true behaviour of a structure be estimated. This can allow for a more optimized design, while also ensuring the cladding and fastening system will not become damaged during the buildings lifetime.
If your structure is experiencing unexplained failures, our advanced models can help narrow down the causes. We can also model various remedial measures, ensuring that fixing issues in one area won’t exacerbate problems elsewhere in the structure.
Whatever you need – we are here to help.
What can we analyse and design?
We can accurately analyse any clad structure, of any size, right down to the individual fasteners, panels and cleats.
Most structural analyses completely disregard the effect of cladding, and include only the primary frames in the structural analysis. Other structures rely entirely on the cladding for stability.
Regardless of how the structure is designed, the cladding will play a vital role in how it performs. The only way of knowing whether cladding will be damaged during the life cycle of the building is to include it in the analysis.
Built on the foundation of decades of research
Our software has been developed to the highest commercial standards and takes advantage of research published in the last few years. The central elastic-plastic analysis engine is based on the same one used to design hundreds of portal frames in the UK, but our enhancements allow us to analyse much larger structures in 3D including detailed consideration of the cladding.
The information you need, fast!
For large structures there are likely to hundreds of thousands of elements, each with numerous results. Our advanced post processors automatically extract the information most important to designers, rapidly calculating the SLS and ULS of the complete structure. We provide these critical outputs in an easy to read form.
Supported structural systems
Supported frame types:
- Portal framed structures fabricated from hot-rolled members
- Trussed structures
- Frames from welded (tapered) steel
- Cold-formed steel frames
Supported cladding systems:
- Profiled steel or aluminium
- Sandwich panels
- Two-skin built up systems
- Cassettes (structural liner trays)