Structural Steel Framing: What Makes Them Reliable and Sustainable?

As a top-notch building material, structural steel framing is remarkably durable and undeniably reliable. Think about the alternatives for a moment, about the masonry bricks, concrete blocks and wooden panels used in building frameworks today. Wood can crack and splinter while bricks break and concrete crumbles, perhaps because the porous material has absorbed water. The water will have frozen and expanded until cracks were created. Switching to structural steel, this uniformly strengthened alloy is free of such integrity-weakening material flaws.

Structural Steel Framing Endures

It is a material that has passed an exhausting number of metallurgical tests. The alloy family gets stress tortured in labs, then its crystal structure is placed under a microscope to see if its grain has deformed. The alloys are cold worked and anneal-relieved, heat treated and coated in corrosion resistant finishes. In plain speak, nothing is left to chance. There are no pores, no membranous wooden laminates, and certainly no organic or mineral substances that can swell unpredictably when the weather takes a bad turn. Structural steel framing is, to say the least, incredibly stable and dense. That indefatigable measure of rock-hard stability assures a non-shifting building framework.

A Future-Proof Sustainable Alloy

Granted, wood is a recyclable substance, but it’s not as if the lumber gets torn down, scrunched up, then reused. No, new forests are grown, and those woodlands occupy acres of land. With structural steel, the recycling mechanism is shorter and simpler. Old steel components are broken down and melted in blast furnaces, then they’re processed and treated. Formed into beams and plates, the process loop soon spins back to the construction site. Even now, new emission controlling guidelines and energy-saving processes are making the reclamation method all the more efficient. According to some statistical reviews, close to 98% of all scrap steel is currently being returned to service after it has been melted down. Other building materials simply cannot match that stat, not in terms of recyclability.

Structural steel is relatively heavy. It’s not a material that’s used to construct small homes. However, the metal features a height-strength-to-weight ratio because of its strong carbon/nickel backbone. The nickel content also makes the structural elements corrosion resistant. Malleable, workable and weldable, the durable beams and sheets form the rugged frameworks of medium-to-large scale buildings. Prefabricated sheds and warehouses benefit from those fabrication-centric attributes, as do multistorey structures. Then, should the day come when a building needs to come down, its wooden scrap and crumbled bricks may make an almighty mess, but that’s not the case with the metal skeleton. That sustainable resource is almost entirely recycled and returned to service.

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