Solar Construction
Vallourec is able to quickly adapt the basic design of its steel structures depending on the sites’ characteristics. With the wide span and superior mechanical features of our hot-rolled seamless Structural Hollow Sections, steel industry manufacturers can build competitive steel structure solutions for the innovative and dynamic solar market.
Thanks to our software solution and in-house design capabilities, we can be involved in the project from start to finish: from first designs and blueprints, for local requirements such as wind loads, to the construction of solutions suitable. Throughout the supply chain of solar PVs, we can interact with developers & utilities to bring in our network of local steel structure manufacturers along with tubes produced in our mills in order to build innovative structures. The steel structure manufacturer is usually in charge of the detailed design and prefabrication, whereas Vallourec supplies the tubes and the installation company erects the structure on site.
Our offer focusses on agricultural greenfield PV hangars, industrial halls and sport center buildings, shade structures for trucks and car parks, and Agri Photovoltaics, as well as some very innovative designs for specific sites.
Seamless Structural Hollow Sections for one-of-a-kind structures
Vallourec’s hot-finished steel Structural Hollow Sections produced in Germany can meet the challenges of your solar construction project. Offering a wide range of sizes and shapes, including round, square, rectangular and hexagonal, our tubes offer a number of advantages for your structure.
Technical advantages
- High load bearing capacity
- Hot rolled sections offer good fatigue resistance
- Seamless
- Good weldability
- Closed sections ensure aesthetic design
- Higher static values than cold-formed tubes or welded
- Problem-free corrosion and fire protection
- EN 10210 standard (or national/international equivalent)
Our PREON® box solution for halls and hangars
Wide, column-free, flexible-space halls require strong supporting beams and roofs. For cost-effective industrial buildings, our PREON® box solution is an iterative software that quickly creates static calculations based on the exact specifications of our steel Structural Hollow Sections. It offers extra flexibility: you can change your design as needed: PREON® box updates the static calculations automatically. From single to multi-bay halls with spans of up to 100 meters, PREON® box optimizes your design for cost-effectiveness.
PV Hangars
With our in-house software PREON® box, we make hangars without inside pillars possible, freeing up more space for equipment storage and vehicle maneuvers. From agricultural hangars with a width range of 20-50 meters to wider industrial halls, our structures can support PV panels for projects of 100 kWp and above. Our design can be quickly adapted to many different site conditions by working hand-in-hand with developers. For all these areas where saving space is crucial, from storing crops and agricultural machinery with hangars to industrial halls for bulk storage, equipment or production lines, or even sport halls, our structures won’t hamper your business.
Shade structures for car and truck parks
Car and truck parks represent huge areas to cover while maintaining ease of use for drivers, for which our structures made of Structural Hollow Sections can bring significant advantages and cost competitiveness. We are able to adapt the number of pillars for shade structures to 10 to 20 meters in width to find an overall economically sustainable balance. Structures with much wider space between columns (compared to welded tubes and open profiles) are possible with hot-rolled seamless tubes, thus freeing up more space for vehicles to maneuver and park.
A reduced number of pillars comes hand-in-hand with a reduced number of foundations, which means less hassle for ground management (avoiding to destroy & restore parking lots, etc.).
With Vallourec’s structures, spans of up to 30 meters between each pillar are a reality.
AgriPV
Agri Photovoltaics includes the installation of PV parks in agricultural lands where energy production and farming (crops, livestock, etc.) coexist or even benefit from one another. In this dynamic new frontier for the PV market, preserving the soil value is very important and our designs meet this challenge with our Structural Hollow Sections.
Our structures can reach heights of up to 4 meters (and above) and withstand impacts from cattle or agricultural machinery. With specific designs, such as 40 meter-long structures with 3 pillars or shade-structures, cattle, duck farms or crop fields can be made while limiting impact on the soil.
AgriPV projects are often constrained by challenging terrain conditions and regulations. We are ready and committed to adapt sizes and designs in order to make PV and agriculture thrive thanks to Vallourec’s tubes.
Grades
From carbon structural steels to high-strength special steels and quenched-and-tempered fine-grain structural steels, we offer a wide range of grades, suitable for all types of applications.
Sizing
- Structural Hollow Sections
Our portfolio of dimensional ranges is the widest in the industry.
Extra-long tubes are available upon request.
- Seamless steel tubes
- Circular: 33.4mm to 355.6mm
- Square: from 50 x 50 mm to 300mm x 300mm
- Rectangular: from 60 x 40mm to 400 x 200mm
Shape options include squared, circular and rectangular.
Always innovating solar structures
Always striving for innovation, we are keen on exploring together challenging and unconventional PV project locations to assess how our tubes can bring added value.
For instance, we extend the possibility to install solar panels even in most unexpected of places: across rivers. Taking advantage of our seamless hot-rolled tubes’ characteristics, we make possible a structure of up to 30 meters long above riverbanks which can follow the rivers for several kilometers. We can also create structures convenient enough to both support solar PVs and provide a nice shaded walkway.
Structural Hollow Sections & Dedicated software to plan smart & design better
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