Revolutionary Steel Structures: A Comprehensive Review of Current Trends and Future Directions
Steel construction has always been a key element of contemporary building with new properties strength, stability and versatility. This work aims to review the profound developments in steel structures area with special emphasis on new tendencies, drawbacks and prospects for future. Innovation areas covered are developments with high-performance steel alloys, prefabrication and modular construction techniques to improve efficiency in the use of global natural resources such as carbonized waste products like slag from coal fired power plants), and Digital Twin technologies which includes AI monitoring systems. These innovations are changing the way steel structures can be designed, constructed and maintained in ways that allow for more efficient and sustainable construction practices we have yet to see.
There is a strong focus on sustainable and eco-friendly steel production, such as with hydrogen based steelmaking and the increased use of recycled materials which help reduce carbon emissions helping this transition towards global circular economy. The paper discusses some of the big challenges facing implementation in infrastructure, as well and the critical need for material performance under these extreme conditions (corrosion & fire resistance), discussing strategies to meet or re-direct them.
In terms of the future, it identifies positive steps that are good news for steel structures in growth sectors such as renewable infrastructure, aerospace and smart cities. Recently, self-healing materials14–19 (and the related quantum-inspired approaches20) were developed and tested for integration into adaptive steel designs21 by means of active fluids… but there many other opportunities in construction where robotic workload can grow further. This paper presents an in-depth examination of these trends and innovations from which the current state-of-the-art regarding innovative steel structures can be extracted, offering pertinent insights on how this is set to or could continue into its role within a burgeoning concept for resilient, sustainable and intelligent built environments.
Keywords: Steel structures, sustainable construction, Digital Twin, AI in construction, high-performance alloys, modular construction, circular economy, smart infrastructure.
