Economies in Structural Steel Design using Different Steel Grade

The purpose of this study is to investigate the economies in using different steel grade in designing steel structures. Most of the steel structure exist today are using conventional grade of steel for instance S355 or S460. The used of high strength steel able to benefit from the weight saving and reduced fabrication costs of using thin plates (Sedlacek & Muller, n.d). However high grade steel is mostly known as difficult to fabrication due to the high content of carbon, which can be improved by using appropriate heat treatment. Nowadays there is a treatment in producing structural steel such as thermo-mechanical controlled process, which able to produce leaner steel and less carbon content. The result of less carbon content is affecting the fabrication properties; the lesser the carbon will increase the fabrication properties. The higher fabrication properties enable to lesser cost in fabrication due to non-require or lesser temperature in preheating process. Therefore the used of high steel grade able to provide saving in term of material cost and fabrication cost.