Sustainability tool to optimise material quantities of steel in the construction industry

The steel industry is arguably one of the most pollutant manufacturing sectors. The vast majority of steel produced worldwide is employed by the construction industry, mostly under the form of profile members for structural use, and it is primarily utilized in framed building structures. Even a small reduction of the steel amount currently used for building structures would therefore be beneficial, in terms of environmental impacts. This paper presents the findings from funded research, aiming to provide design practitioners with an effective optimisation tool to facilitate more material-efficient structural frames to be designed, hence allowing the design community to play an active role in the ongoing 'battle' to mitigate the environmental impacts linked to the construction sector. Given a small set of required input parameters, the developed tool consents to generate a wide range of (geometrically and topologically) different steel frame designs, based on optimised cross-sectional steel profiles. Overall measures of the steel mass quantities, associated with the optimised steel frame design, are then computed and outputted. In this way, the user can quantify, in an early phase of the design process, how much a chosen frame layout will affect the structural mass of the building, therefore having a design tool to explore alternative structural layout solutions, based on the range of building's shapes limitedly to the particular project at hand