Iron Axis
Structural Engineering
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A Dubai Municipality licensed structural engineer, engaged directly. Post-tensioned, reinforced concrete and steel design to the authority’s submission format — plus the software we built to do it faster.
Engage a Dubai Municipality licensed structural engineer directly. No account layer, no junior redraw, no waiting on someone else's resourcing. You talk to the person who runs the model and signs the calculation.
Queries go to the person who built the model and come back the same working day. Nothing is relayed through a project manager, and nothing is lost on the way.
Dubai Municipality Unlimited Design and Post-Tension Design licences. What you receive is a submission package in the authority's format and your consultant's specification — not advice you still have to package.
A fixed fee against a defined package, a rate per floor, or a day rate for overflow work. Agreed before anything starts, and it does not move unless the scope does.
Scheme through to authority submission for a defined building — analysis, calculations, drawings, schedules and the submission set, delivered as one coordinated package.
Priced per typical floor or by slab area. Tendon layout, drape and chair profiles, punching design and the detailing set for each level, issued floor by floor to suit the pour programme.
Slot in behind your own team when the office is loaded. We work in your templates, your title block and your CAD standard, under your review and your professional cover.
Independent checking, authority and consultant comment responses, RFI cover and method statement review — charged by the day or half-day against a defined, short scope.
Most consultancies treat post-tensioning as a specialist item to be subcontracted. We treat it as the starting point of the structural scheme — because that is where the thickness, the programme and the cost are actually decided.
Iron Axis is led by Mohamed Shahid PK, a structural engineer with more than fourteen years in post-tensioned and reinforced concrete design, holding both Dubai Municipality Unlimited Design and Post-Tension Design licences.
We work the whole way down the chain: scheme and slab optimisation, full analysis and design in concrete and steel, detailing and drawing production, authority submission, and technical support once the job is on site — reviewing method statements, answering RFIs, and checking specialist submittals for post-tensioning, façade and steelwork.
The practice works alongside Smart Slab Prestressed Concrete Contracting, a Dubai post-tensioning specialist contractor. That gives our design decisions a rare feedback loop — we see how the tendons are actually laid, stressed and grouted, and it shows in the buildability of what we detail.
Three core disciplines — post-tensioned concrete, reinforced concrete and structural steel — plus the specialist scopes around them. Every package is designed, checked and documented to the governing authority's requirements and the lead consultant's specification, so it goes in once.
Banded and distributed layouts, drape profiling, prestress and thickness optimisation, transfer and service checks, deflection and crack control, hyperstatic effects.
Full building design — frames, flat slabs, beams, columns, shear walls and cores — with lateral analysis, drift checks and seismic detailing to the governing code.
Steelwork from member sizing to connection design — moment and shear connections, base plates, bracing, composite decks, staircases, canopies and façade support steel — plus independent review of PEB and specialist steel submittals.
Rafts, piled rafts, isolated and combined footings, under-reamed piles, crane and plant foundations. Settlement, bearing and soil–structure interaction reviewed against the GI report.
Critical perimeter checks, stud-rail and stirrup schedules, shear caps and drop panels, with detailing output produced directly from the analysis results — not redrawn by hand.
Independent checking of a third-party design, slab thickness and prestress optimisation, and structured compliance statements answering authority and consultant design-review comments point by point.
Assessment of overloaded, damaged or altered structures, residual capacity checks, and CFRP flexural and shear strengthening design with full bond and detailing checks.
Method statement and temporary works review, RFI response, submittal review for post-tensioning, façade and steel structure packages, and coordination with architects, MEP and the main contractor.
Get the tendon profile right and the slab gets thinner, the deflections disappear and the programme shortens. Get it wrong and no amount of rebar recovers it.
Every post-tensioned slab we design is checked at transfer and in service, for flexure, punching, deflection and crack width, with the hyperstatic effects carried properly through to the reinforced concrete design. Nothing is left to a rule of thumb.
We work in both unbonded monostrand — the system that dominates Middle East practice — and bonded multistrand, and we produce the tendon layouts, chair profiles, stressing schedules and elongation records that the specialist contractor actually needs on site.
The working rules we apply at scheme stage, before a single tendon is drawn. They set the starting point — the design is still whatever the calculation says.
Span/depth drives everything downstream. For interior spans of an unbonded flat slab, L/d ≈ 40–45 works with light superimposed load; come down to 36–38 where deflection-sensitive partitions, long cantilevers or heavy finishes govern. Fix the thickness first — prestress and rebar are the cheap variables.
L/d 40–45ACI 318-19 sets a minimum average effective prestress of 0.86 MPa on the gross section for two-way slabs. The useful working range is roughly 1.0–2.0 MPa. Push past about 2.5 MPa and you buy restraint cracking and axial shortening, not capacity.
P/A 1.0–2.0 MPaBalancing much above 85% of dead load tends to hog the slab and leave long-term upward camber. Much below 55% and you have paid for a PT system that behaves like a conventional slab. Aim between the two and let the unbalanced load run the deflection check.
60–80% of DLRun the punching check on the first thickness iteration, not the last. The vertical component of the tendon force only helps where the tendons actually cross the critical section — and stud rails retro-fitted after the layout is frozen will force the tendons to move.
Check at iteration 1At stressing the concrete is young — f′ci is often only 22–28 MPa at three to five days — and there is almost no superimposed load holding the slab down. Top-fibre tension over supports at transfer catches more otherwise-sound designs than the service check does.
f′ci at 3–5 daysStiff cores and shear walls absorb the prestress you assumed went into the slab. On long floor plates put pour strips in at roughly 40–50 m centres and leave them open long enough for the early shortening to happen. Assume a free slab and you will find the cracks on site.
Pour strips 40–50 mUsable drape is what survives top and bottom cover, the sheathing and the bars crossing it — for a 250 mm slab that is around 165 mm, not 200. Check it against the chair heights the contractor can actually buy before it goes on the drawing.
250 slab → 165 drapeThe structural-integrity rules require at least two tendons in each direction to pass within the column core. It is the detail most often lost when a layout is shifted around a late opening — and it is the one that matters if a column is ever lost.
2 tendons min., each wayTheoretical elongation, gauge pressure, stressing sequence and the acceptance band — typically ±7% — belong on the drawing set, not in an email three weeks later. It is the difference between a clean QC record and a site query per tendon.
Elongation ±7%Figures quoted are scheme-stage rules of thumb for unbonded monostrand flat slabs to ACI 318-19, offered in good faith and not a substitute for project-specific design. Ask us and we will run the numbers on your grid.
Move the sliders. This runs the same scheme-stage rule set as the nine above — span/depth, load balancing and a minimum precompression floor — so you can see in ten seconds whether post-tensioning is worth the conversation.
Scheme-stage indication for an unbonded monostrand flat slab on a regular grid, load balanced at 70% of sustained load with a 0.86 MPa precompression floor. Not a design. Punching, transfer, restraint and deflection all still have to be checked properly.
Over twenty in-house applications sit behind the practice — reading model exports, running the code checks and writing the drawings. They remove the transcription step, which is where errors actually come from.
Reads AutoCAD geometry straight from the architectural DXF and builds the analysis model — slabs, beams, columns, walls and openings — without redrawing a line.
Generates tendon runs, drape profiles and chair heights from the slab geometry, then writes them back into the drawing as real CAD entities.
Takes the RAM Concept punching export, runs the ACI 318-19 check and produces the stud-rail schedule and the detailing callouts on the plan.
Sweeps slab thickness and prestress against deflection, punching and stress limits, driven directly from the live ETABS model through the API.
Converts required-reinforcement contours into practical bar marks, laps and schedules — drawn on the plan, not left as a table for someone else to interpret.
Full-span RC beam and slab design to ACI 318-19 or IS 456:2000, output as a dimensioned drawing with the calculation behind it.
Preliminary isolated and combined footing layouts straight from the column load schedule, sized against the allowable bearing pressure.
Gauge-pressure calculation, measured elongation checked against theoretical, and the QC record set the authority asks to see.
Turns an authority or consultant review-comment schedule into a structured, clause-referenced response document ready for resubmission.
Every tool runs offline — single-file HTML, or a Windows executable. Nothing leaves the office. Built for our own delivery first; where one is useful to a client's design office, we license or adapt it.
The same applications that run behind our own delivery, licensed for your design office. Everything runs offline — a Windows executable or a single HTML file — so nothing about your project leaves your machine.
Perpetual licence · one year of updates · order and pay over WhatsApp
Design walkthroughs and software demonstrations from the drawing board — the reasoning behind the decisions, not just the button presses.
A fixed sequence, so you always know which stage the design is at and what is needed from you next.
Architectural set, GI report, loading, authority requirements and programme.
Framing options, slab type and thickness, prestress level, comparative cost.
Full model, gravity and lateral, all code checks at transfer and service.
Tendon layouts, rebar, sections and schedules issued as a coordinated set.
Calculation report, submission set, and structured replies to review comments.
RFIs, method statement review, stressing records and as-built resolution.
Projects delivered across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and India — typically where a long span, a thin slab or a difficult transfer is driving the structure.
PT flat slabs over podium and typical floors, transfer structures, core-and-outrigger layouts.
Long-span column grids, heavy point loads, coordination with MEP service zones.
Water-retaining detailing, crack control, pour strips and construction joint strategy.
Portal frames and PEB review, mezzanines and platforms, tower crane bases, machine foundations and heavy industrial slabs.
Overload and damage assessment, CFRP strengthening, change-of-use capacity checks.
Conventional RC design with pile or pad foundations, delivered to local authority format.
Give us the plans, the loading and the programme, and we will come back with a framing option, an indicative slab thickness and a fee.
⟨ office address is a placeholder — replace before publishing ⟩
For post-tensioning supply and installation, we work with Smart Slab Prestressed Concrete Contracting — ask us and we will route the enquiry.
Iron Axis is a structural and civil engineering consultancy covering post-tensioned concrete, reinforced concrete and structural steel design, produced to the governing authority’s submission format and the lead consultant’s specification. Led by Mohamed Shahid PK, holding Dubai Municipality Unlimited Design and Post-Tension Design licences, with 14+ years of experience across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and India.
| Practice | Iron Axis — Structural Engineering |
| Location | Dubai, United Arab Emirates |
| Contact | ironaxis2026@gmail.com · +971 52 118 2569 (tel / WhatsApp) |
| Prepared by | Shahid PK |
| Units | SI / metric |