Advantages of Metal Industrial Buildings

The construction of industrial warehouses in metal is the best choice in terms of sustainability and cost-benefit ratio.
In the field of industrial construction, structural metal is not a simple alternative to reinforced concrete buildings, as it allows the design and construction of more complex, flexible and more personalized architectural forms.
Industrial warehouses are structures with very particular building, structural and technical characteristics and must meet many requirements: safety, circulation of equipment or vehicles, containment of consumption, etc.

Furthermore, they are very flexible, so as to combine business needs with those of representation, if for example an aesthetic value is also required (See Coating facades ).

Industrial structures: the characteristics

An industrial warehouse is a single-storey building with a mezzanine floor for offices.
They are usually made with prefabricated structures with reinforced concrete beams and pillars and lateral infill panels in prefabricated panels.
The horizontally distributed space of this structure is used for the production process while the marginal one is used for service areas such as offices, laboratories, etc.

The supporting roof structures must ensure roofs with large spans and often include the insertion of skylights to let natural light through.
Furthermore, the characteristics of industrial warehouses are linked to the cadastral categories to which they belong.
In the cadastre classification, industrial properties are divided, in relation to the intended use, into various categories such as:

• warehouse (C2);
• craft workshop (C3);
• factory (D1);
• buildings constructed or adapted for the special needs of an industrial activity and not susceptible of different use without radical transformations (D7);
• buildings for productive functions connected to agricultural activities (D10).

These classifications are intended to increase the logistical and production capacities of any company, to create production and storage areas in a short time or to cover any activity.

All products and artifacts are manufactured in compliance with European product standards with CE marking and certifying their quality and traceability throughout the supply chain, from production to the construction site.

SEISMIC SAFETY IN STEEL

The post-elastic resources of steel are fundamental characteristics for the dissipation of the energy transmitted by the earthquake to the structure.
It is known that prefabricated reinforced concrete structures have a less efficient behavior because they are made in a static way, where the beams are simply placed on the column, thus preventing the development of plastic hinges at the ends of the beams or in the beam-column joints, characteristics of the steel which through these phenomena generates an optimal energy dissipation.
The metal structures guarantee the possibility of absorbing seismic energy, using the high plastic reserves typical of steel, through the use of construction details that are decidedly less expensive than those that would be required in a prefabricated reinforced concrete structure.
In addition, the steel structures have lower structural weights than those in prefabricated concrete, thus lowering the magnitude of the inertial forces generated by the earthquake on the structure.