ABOUT
our Vision
We want to revolutionise and transform the way that vibrations in floors are mitigated in modern construction. Read on to find out more about our company!
All too often we have seen excess construction materials being used solely to control resonant floor vibrations caused by the really small forces from people simply walking around. Our vision is to stop this and save thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete worldwide helping reduce significantly global carbon emissions.
Our alternative approach is intelligent active control systems, distributed and sensing vibrations at key points throughout the structure. These provide a similarly small force that is precisely timed to counteract human-induced forces and enable highly efficient and elegant structures.
What you will learn about us is that we are driven to preserve and enable highly efficient, lightweight and elegant long-span floor structures which are long-term sustainable in this climate emergency. Over the next 40 years, the world is expected to create 230 billion square metres of structural flooring in new buildings to address the needs of the growing human population. Buildings and construction together account for 36% of global energy use, a huge proportion of which (40%) is energy embodied in making and erecting construction materials.
In a multi-storey building, floors contribute about 60% of the mass of the whole building. As much as half of these materials are wasted as a result of over-specification in floor structural design to manage risks due to unknown loads and structural behaviour. The main driver in this wasteful over-design is not safety (against collapse) but serviceability, chiefly avoiding excessive floor vibrations in normal daily use due to people just walking across the floor.
We envisage a world where advanced control technologies make lightweight and long span structures suitable for even the most vibration critical areas. We believe that wasteful structural overdesign to control vibrations is entirely avoidable and a thing of the past. Active vibration control technologies are the future of vibration serviceability in construction and we are leading the way in innovative approaches to solve the associated challenges that lay ahead.
Company
FSD Active was incorporated in 2020 as a product development business by our four founders Paul, Emma, Alex and James. From our base in Colyton in the South West of the UK, our focus is to advance and promote the use of vibration control technology throughout the world.
We are, at heart, problem solvers. After seeing first hand for many years the often unresolvable difficulties in meeting vibration requirements in modern structures, our team developed CALMFLOOR: a revolutionary active vibration control technology for building floors which is commercially available worldwide.
Thriving on innovation and quality British engineering, we are also keen to develop bespoke solutions for structures that demand it. At FSD Active, we strongly believe in using the right tool for the job, and when that tool doesn’t exist yet – we create it.
people
We are driven to provide high quality vibration control solutions for any structure.