Future development prospects of steel structure buildings in China

Feb 05, 2025

Future development prospects of steel structure buildings in China

Our country's economic development fundamentals are solid, with a complete industrial system, strong component processing and manufacturing and supporting capabilities, which provides broad space for the accelerated development of steel structure buildings.

1. Steel structure buildings will enter a new stage of high-quality development.

Intelligent production, green construction, modular construction, prefabricated decoration, and ultra-low energy consumption in operation will be the development trend of prefabricated steel structure buildings in the future. To achieve high efficiency, standardization, and assembly throughout the entire process of steel structure construction, it is necessary to collaborate with the entire industry chain, continuously innovate and improve from the client side, product side, and optimize supply chain management, cultivate new advantages with technology, standards, brands, quality, credit, and services as the core, and create new development momentum through digital empowerment, intelligent efficiency, and green and low-carbon, and promote the high-quality development of prefabricated steel structure buildings.

2. The demand for steel for steel structure buildings will usher in new changes.

Super high-rise, large-span and other steel structure buildings have put forward new requirements for modern engineering construction in terms of safety and functionality. Green and sustainable building steel with high strength and toughness, high seismic resistance, easy welding, and no painting will become the future development direction. At the same time, hot-rolled H-shaped steel for construction will be actively used. The steel used in steel structures of major developed economies abroad is mainly hot-rolled H-shaped steel and high-strength and high-performance steel, with an application rate of more than 50%. At present, 80% of steel used in my country's steel structures is ordinary steel of Q235 grade. The steel used in construction and its variety structure need to be optimized. We should vigorously promote hot-rolled H-shaped steel and replace Q235 grade steel with high-strength and high-performance steel of Q355 grade and higher to meet the steel requirements of steel structure and steel structure construction industry.

3. Green and low-carbon prefabricated steel structure buildings have new advantages.
Steel structure buildings are an energy-saving, environmentally friendly and recyclable engineering structure form from the perspective of the entire product life cycle. According to the data from the report "Steel Structure Housing Industrialization Consultation Research" of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, steel structure buildings can reduce energy consumption by 12%, carbon dioxide emissions by 15%, and solid waste by 51% per square meter compared with reinforced concrete buildings during production and construction.

Driven by the goal of carbon neutrality, low-carbonization of the construction industry will become an inevitable trend. Prefabricated steel structure buildings have high efficiency in construction, high precision in control, high flexibility in installation, and recyclable materials. At the same time, the internal intelligent manufacturing system, pipelines, equipment, and internal decoration can be assembled at a rate of more than 90%, which will be conducive to the realization of zero-carbon buildings.

4. The future structural modeling of steel structure buildings will highlight natural harmony.

The future modeling of steel structure buildings will be more combined with nature and local culture. The structure and form will show the trend of "ethereal beauty, line beauty, dynamic beauty, exquisite beauty, and color beauty", and the bionic tendency and ecological development trend will be more obvious.

At present, the application of steel structure in infrastructure construction, public buildings and other fields in my country has basically been able to achieve market-oriented and sustainable development under the support of existing policies, and the use of steel is showing a trend of high performance and high efficiency. At the same time, the promotion and application of steel structure houses are still insufficient, which is the focus and difficulty of the future development of steel structure buildings. In the next step, we must give full play to the super-large-scale market advantages of the two major industries of steel and construction, utilize the steel industry's sufficient and advanced manufacturing technology and industrial chain coordination capabilities, promote innovation in the model and business format of steel-structured houses, and build strong market competitiveness.