Following the arrival of our new structural engineer we are pleased to agree the continued maintenance of our CSC software packages; TEDDS and FASTRACK BUILDING DESIGNER.

The packages enable M Design to undertake all our structural designs quickly and effectively and most importantly to provide economical design solutions for our clients.

The TEDDS package is a great tool for any engineering practice and just handles the day to day structural calculations brilliantly. Everyday calculations in steel, timber, masonry, concrete as well as composite materials can be prepared with speed and ease. As an office we carry out steel beam and column designs and connection details on a daily basis and the time saved with the software is a huge bonus.

With timber design we can quickly design any element such as floor joists, rafters and struts as well as composite glulam and flitch beams. We are also able to analyse timber frames such as feature roof trusses; something we have done a lot of recently on the barn conversion project at Farewell Hall in Durham.

The other calculations we can do with the software include retaining wall design, soakaway design, SAPS, a multitude of foundation types - all features we need constantly and all features that keep M Design competitive and at the cutting edge of the latest eurocode design codes.

When the projects get bigger (and I guess with some strangely small jobs too!)  we turn to Fastrack Building Designer. This enables us to model multi storey steel frame buildings and get analysis and also detailed design of each individual member. This means we can undertake any size of project with speed and efficiency.

As a multi-disiplined practice this is fantastic as we are able to import architectural drawings directly into the software, which identifies the steel column locations. The loadings are then input into the model and design begins. Once this is complete we can export the structural members directly into AutoCAD which saves time and obviously money! The other advantage is that it cuts down on any chance of errors as nothing needs to be typed into the drawings!

The continued investment into these cutting edge software solutions has helped M Design grow steadily each year and earned a great reputation with its client who are regularly pleasantly surprised at what we can actually do!!!!