Ruukki’s Friends Arena
A press tour held by Ruukki for a number of leading Russian media including Tall Buildings magazine took place from October 20 to 22. The tour focused on important and topical issues, namely the ways to increase the soperational lifetime of buildings being currently under construction. During the press tour, its participants visited the capitals of Finland and Sweden – Helsinki and Stockholm where they got the chance to meet Ruukki representatives and explore the construction process. The specialists visited some of the Scandinavian sites to observe already finished and commissioned Ruukki buildings, as well as ones that were at the final construction stage.
The presented sites included Mall of Scandinavia, the largest shopping center in Northern Europe that opened its doors in November 2015, and Friends Arena, the worldfamous football stadium. Both facilities are situated in the Stockholm suburbs called Solna. Friends Arena is one of the world’s modern stadiums. It was officially opened on November 14, 2012, on the date of friendly match between Sweden and England, and shortly after it became one of Sweden places of interest. It is Friends Arena that will host the 2016/17 Europa League Final. The stadium has a total capacity of 50 thousand persons at football matches and up to 65 thousand spectators at concerts.
A retractable roof – one of the stadium features – makes it possible to play matches and concerts in all types of weather. The mall and the stadium are facilities designed for mass gatherings. Safety issues at such sites require special and extremely careful attention. This also includes security, reliability, and durability of structures used for construction. Members of the press were given a vivid demonstration of benefits achieved when using new alloys such as highstrength steel in the construction of such facilities.
Currently high-strength special steels are not so widely used in construction. The reasons include the lack of construction engineers’ knowledge about this material, the absence of sufficient experience of using new steel alloys, as well as legislation issues (national regulations on construction materials are upgraded not so fast as innovative materials are developed and introduced). However, high-strength steel structures feature important advantages, and the eloquent evidence is Friends Arena. This site showed system and material optimization in terms of performance and cost-effective production. Using steel structures within the project among other factors made it possible to achieve substantial material and money savings.
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Materials provided by RUUKKI