Off-site Pre Fabrication – The Quality And Safety Advantage

Use of pre-fabricated components reduces site activity for frame construction by up to 75%.It also gives site engineers the freedom to operate. A controlled, manufacturing environment ensures high quality and improves safety on site.

Flooring Choices

Floors completed and decked are used as a safe working platform for subsequent installation of steelwork. For this reason, the higher floor in a group of floors (usually three floor levels) is often concreted first.

Steel framed office buildings built for offices and commercial establishments most commonly use the following flooring choices. Below are the generic forms of flooring systems most commonly used in steel framed office buildings.

Shallow Composite Slabs

• Using steel deck profiles typically of 50 to 80 mm depth.
• The slab depth is usually 130 to 160 mm, depending on the deck depth and fire insulation requirement.
• Typical spans are 2.5 to 4.5m depending on the deck spanning capabilities.

Precast concrete slabs

• Generally used in the form of hollow-core units of 150 to 300 mm depth with an in-situ concrete slab of 60 to 100 mm depth
• Typical spans are 5 to 10 m depending on the depth of the hollow-core units.

How To Control Floor Vibrations?

• The fundamental vibration frequency of (normal walking) the floor is controlled by maximising stiffners of the floor grid structure.

Acoustic

• A raised access floor and suspended ceiling provides some additional benefits, but are not generally taken into account in terms of their acoustic attention.

Corrosion Protection

• Steel frames do not generally require protection against corrosion. Exceptions may be made for steelwork in coastal and hilly areas Steel decking and light steel infill walls use galvanized steel and are protected against corrosion in an internal atmosphere. In infill walls, the light steel components, which are also galvanized, are weather protected by the cladding system and by the external insulation.

Facade / Wall / Cladding

• The types of facade systems that are used are decided depending upon the scale of the building and its location. For premium, city center projects, curtain walling systems are generally used and these systems assist in providing internal climatic control. Separating walls are often in the form of double skin light steel walls and in steel framed construction. These walls should be aligned with beams. In smaller projects, more traditional cladding systems are generally used, which would include brickwork and stone veneer panels. Light steel infill walls are often used to support the cladding.