Zamil Steel, the largest manufacturer of pre-engineered steel buildings in Asia and Africa with a production capacity of 4.5 million sq m per year is also the first in the Arabian Gulf region to design, manufacture and market space frame structures.

Since acquiring the exclusive licence for the design and manufacture of the Australian-invented Harley Systems space frame in 1989, Zamil Steel has broadened the application of the Harley technology by incorporating it into a complete building package.
The Zamil package includes a complete building shell comprising steel columns, bracing, roof purlins, wall girts, cladding, and structural subsystems such as fascias, canopies, parapets, mezzanine structures and roof platforms, among other things.
Also available in the package are building accessories such as personnel doors, roll-up doors, sliding doors, gravity ventilators, louvers, power ventilators and fiberglass insulation.
“Zamil Steel provides single-source responsibility for the design, fabrication and (optional) erection of a complete space frame building system,” a company spokesman says.
“Functional price-sensitive structures such as warehouses, workshops and light industrial factories can now be aesthetically enhanced,” he adds.
The Zamil Steel Space Frame Engineering Group works with architects from the time of architectural design conceptualisation to the development of details necessary to make the project aesthetic and functional.
The space frame, a modular three-dimensional lattice structure consisting of pyramidal units with uniform dimensions, has become a popular roof system because it introduces aesthetic features and vibrant colours into buildings that had traditionally been designed for function alone.
A conventional space frame structure is a two-way load-carrying structure constructed with steel pipes that are mechanically fastened to forged solid steel balls called nodes. Stresses within the space frame structures are transferred only through tension and compression.
Space frame systems utilising the traditional ball node design dominate the space frame industry worldwide but their high cost has drastically limited the growth of the space frame market.
The Harley technique introduced economy in the space frame industry by making it unnecessary to use forged solid steel ball node connections, which accounted for half the cost of the structure. Instead the system makes a nodal point an integral part of the chord members, achieving it by using standard high-strength bolts to join the ends of the diagonal pipes to the top and bottom cold-formed channel chords.
Ordinarily the Harley system has commercial and industrial applications such as warehouses, high-tech factories and aircraft hangars.
But in the creative architectural building market segment, the applications include automobile showrooms, sports halls, shopping malls, schools, supermarkets and retail superstores.
“The inherent low cost of the Harley Systems space frame concept coupled with Zamil Steel’s complementary products and economies of scale, results in the most competitively priced complete space frame building available anywhere,” says the  Zamil spokesman.
Zamil engineers use computer software including GT Strudl, hailed as the world’s most sophisticated structural analysis programme, and an intricate in-house developed CAD programme that generates approval drawings, erection drawings, shop details and bills of material.
Zamil’s building system includes steel support columns, bracing components, secondary ‘Z’ and ‘C’ cold formed members, single-skin roof and wall panels and insulated sandwich panels.
The company also supplies building shell accessories such as insulation, personnel doors, sky lights, wall lights, gravity and power roof ventilators, stilting doors, roll-up doors and louvers.
Other systems such as curtain walls and air conditioning are supplied through Zamil Steel’s sister companies Zamil Aluminium, Zamil Glass and Zamil Airconditioning.
The company owns and operates three state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Vietnam and has supplied more than 25,000 pre-engineered steel buildings to more than 55 countries since 1977.
Unless otherwise required by local conditions, all Zamil Steel buildings are designed and manufactured in accordance with the latest editions of the following US codes: American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), Uniform Building Code (UBC), American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and American Welding Society (AWS).
The company has a site specialist resident in each of its 38 area offices in 30 countries as well as a network of certified builders working closely with the area offices to quote for turnkey projects or “erection of building only.”