For the first time in Poland, Steel Day will take place in Warsaw on 14 November 2018. ArcelorMittal has partnered with Build With Steel (Buduj ze stali) to organise this full-day event at the Sheraton Warsaw Hotel geared towards investors, architects, designers, and general contractors to promote steel in the construction market.

The Steel Day programme

Steel Day will consist of talks by specialists from production, galvanising, and design companies, and lectures given by well-known architects and representatives of industry associations.

Among the speakers will be ArcelorMittal Europe – Flat Products’ Tomasz Plaskura presenting ‘Innovation in steel for the architecture of tomorrow’ and ArcelorMittal Global R&D’s Dr Renata Obiała presenting ‘Engineering fire safety of construction and creativity of designers’.

Build With Steel (Buduj ze stali)

Build With Steel is a programme developed in cooperation with steel market companies in Poland, including ArcelorMittal, with an aim to address the industry’s expectations for increasing the use of steel in the building industry.

Registration and the full programme for Steel Day is available here.

Please note: The location of this event was changed. The new location is the Sheraton Warsaw Hotel.

Text: Constructalia
Photos: Buduj ze stali

These best practice design manuals consist of a series of technical guides for engineering offices, steel fabricators, and architects that aim at facilitating the application of the Eurocodes in the design of single-storey and multi-storey steel buildings.

The presented design manuals consist of a series of technical guides facilitating the application of the Eurocodes in the design of single-storey and multi-storey steel buildings.

These design manuals are helpful for steel fabricators and engineering offices, but the presentation of the advantages and possibilities of the use of steel also applies to architects. They provide a useful source of knowledge for designers in accordance with the Eurocodes and include topics such as numerous design details, fire engineering issues, member and connection resistance calculators, etc.

The design guides 'Single-Storey Steel Buildings' and 'Multi-Storey Steel Buildings' were produced in the framework of the European project 'Facilitating the market development for sections in industrial halls and low rise buildings (SECHALO) RFS2-CT-2008-0030', which was carried out with a financial grant from the European Union's Research Fund for Coal and Steel.

The design guides were prepared under the direction of ArcelorMittal, Peiner Träger, and Corus. The technical content was prepared by CTICM and SCI, collaborating as the Steel Alliance.

In Italy, the Fondazione Promozione Acciaio and ArcelorMittal are very active in promoting steel as the best alternative to reconstruct damaged buildings after earthquakes.

Since the middle ages, Italy has recorded almost 100 earthquakes of varying severity. Recently in L’Aquila, in Abruzzo, Umbria and Marche the country has suffered from earthquakes that have caused hundreds of fatalities and extensive damage to constructions.

Reconstruction is therefore an imperative for the Italian community. It encompasses various challenges in terms of speed of construction, cost, versatility and of course seismic resistance.

While historically Italian architects and engineers have been taught to build with concrete, the Fondazione Promozione Acciaio (FPA) and ArcelorMittal are actively promoting steel, which offers outstanding advantages over concrete, particularly in seismic environments.

In September 2016 in Bologna and in October in Firenze, Marco Tognoni, CTS coordinator and Luca Collavoli, account manager at the Milano agency gave 2 lectures on this theme to an audience of dozens of architects and engineers.

Easy to construct and deconstruct, resistant to fire, 100% recyclable, steel is the material of choice for designing buildings that cope with earthquakes because it is inherently ductile and flexible - flexing under extreme loads rather than crushing or crumbling. Furthermore, many of the beam-to-column connections in a steel building are designed principally to support gravity loads. Yet they also have a considerable capacity to resist lateral loads caused by wind and earthquakes.

As Françoise Carrara, construction market coordinator for the South-West region points out, “these awareness initiatives towards architects and engineers are very important to contribute to the development of a culture for steel in Italy”.

Indeed, our Italian teams carry out events on a regular basis to promote steel in construction in Italy, in parallel to the training sessions that FPA organises in the regions recently affected by earthquakes.

ArcelorMittal has launched a new reference guide for engineers and fabricators, which will serve as an essential aid in the design of steel buildings and structures: the Orange Book.

Comprehensive tables of member resistances are given to enable rapid selection of steel members in compression, bending and tension. Tables are also provided for combined bending and compression, web resistance and shear resistance.

Steel product ranges include:

• S355/HISTAR®355 and S460/HISTAR®460 for structural steel sections
• S355, S420 and S460 steel grades for heavy plates.
• S350GD, S390GD, S420GD, S450 GD & S550 GD for metallic coated steels

Click here to visit ArcelorMittal's Orange Book!

LCA - Life cycle analysis or assessment, now a common method for all resources and products, is of course also important for steel in construction. ArcelorMittal is fully committed to promoting the sustainability of steel. LCAs in the construction industry will now include the so called "Module D" which considers the end of life recycling possibilities of construction materials in general and metals and steel products  in particular.

What is LCA?

The procedures of LCA are part of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) 14040 series of standards. LCA provides a methodology to take into account the environmental impacts of the manufacturing processes of a product, the extraction of the raw materials used by these processes, the use and maintenance of the product by the consumer, its end–of-life (recycling, reuse or disposal) as well as the various methods of transport occurring between every link of the chain. Below pic. 1

LCA for steel products

Correct modelling of the recycling potential of steel products at the end-of-life phase is critical for our sector to compete with other materials and demonstrate the performance of steels solutions to meet  the demand for “best in class” sustainable buildings.

At  ArcelorMittal, safe, sustainable steel has long been our tagline. A life-cycle approach translates the relatively high input of energy and associated emissions of the transformation process from units of mass into units of functionality (i.e. “functional equivalence”,  e.g. the same load bearing capacity over certain length for different beam solutions).

Our advanced high strength steels showcase their premium structural performance over conventional steels or competitive materials in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) benchmarks measured over unit of functionality.

In Europe, an environmental product declaration (EPD) is a standardized way of quantifying the environmental impact of a product or system following Life Cycle Analysis.

For us as a steelmaker, it is also strategically important to demonstrate this life-style approach - in terms of governments and policies – so that the long service-life, re-use and multi-recycling characteristics of steel are adequately appreciated and measured.

However, a recurring point of contention in the tools used to define these government policies is how to quantify the environmental benefits of recycling.

Typically steel products made over the integrated route have a scrap content limited to a value between 10-20% where as the product at end-of-life will be recycled at rates between 85-95%. The ‘recycled content’ method only incorporates the environmental benefits realised today, in contrast with the ‘end-of-life’ method that additionally accounts  for the future environmental benefits emerging from scrap that will be generated at end-of-life.

Metal industries like ours are advocating the “end-of-life recycling rate” as the most appropriate indicator for metals while available volumes of scrap are insufficient to match demand.

Steel and construction

The construction and infrastructure industry is our biggest client; a large percentage of the steel we produce ends up in buildings across the world – from the new One World Trade Centre in New York City to low-cost housing communities in South Africa.

Government environmental regulators’ studies indicate that the construction industry is responsible for a huge part of the CO2 emissions and energy consumption and up to 70% of all waste. This has brought the construction industry to the top of the regulators’ list of priorities.

To enable the adequate assessment of the sustainability of buildings and public or civil-works, products used in construction of buildings are increasingly required to provide EPDs for all products used listing clearly the major environmental impacts over different stages of its life-cycle. (Picture 2)

CEN/TC 350 and the importance of Module D

In Europe, to avoid the creation of trade barriers in the common market, the European Commission gave a mandate to its normalisation body, CEN/ TC 350, to develop a harmonised standard to define the methodology to implement and calculate EPDs and assess sustainable performances at building level.

Knowing that the EPDs of products are the basis of their competitive strength in the environmental assessment of a building, all the relevant material sectors took an interest in guiding the calculation method developed under CEN/TC 350 to reflect the specific competitive strengths of the material they represented.

The result was the publication of the final standard, called EN 15804 at the end of 2012. This standard includes a “Module D” which provides the opportunity to account for the benefits of end-of-life recycling of steel in an EPD.

The inclusion of Module D is a major accomplishment which extends the reporting of environmental benefits of recycling from recycled content percentages only to equally include the end-of-life recycling possibilities. This method and inclusion is especially significant for steel products made predominantly from iron ore, for example flat steel products made via the integrated route. Being net generators of scrap, these products can now claim the environmental credits of future recycling in Module D.

This also has other repercussions. If Module D were not included, it would have caused a significant negative impact on the competitive position in environmental assessments for all of ArcelorMittal’s products.

Entrenching Module D into all assessments

Currently Module D - with the end of life recycling benefits -  is an optional module for assessments of buildings and constructions.

The added value of making Module D reporting mandatory is already recognised in Germany (IBU system) and Belgium (Royal Decree on building products) and in France at the beginning of 2014.

Recently, AISI in the United States has shown  interest in  the European methodology to implement EPDs, including our “Module D” approach and the new version of LEED building assessment is also considering EPDs as part of the environmental performance of buildings.