LimitState specializes in the development of powerful, yet easy-to-use software applications which harness unique optimization technology to rapidly identify critical collapse mechanisms and associated margins of safety. This allows engineers to move beyond simple 'automated hand calculations' and predefined mechanisms, but without the need to resort to significantly more complex and potentially cumbersome techniques.
The Company
LimitState’s headquarters at The Innovation Centre in Sheffield, UK
LimitState develops software products and supplies training courses, seminars and related consultancy services for structural and geotechnical engineers. Our innovative software products use novel computational limit analysis techniques to rapidly and robustly analyse the ultimate (collapse) limit state.
Our training courses and seminars are designed to cover the fundamental principles which underpin various key structural and geotechnical applications, with the highly visual output from LimitState software being used to reinforce these principles in an extremely effective manner.
Founded in 2006 by academic co-founders Matthew Gilbert, Colin Smith, Wael Darwich and Andy Tyas, the company has maintained close links with academia, and the ethos of innovation and the desire to continually push the boundaries is carried throughout the company.
Our Products
Unlike other commercially available offerings, our software takes full advantage of state-of-the-art optimization algorithms to rapidly analyse the ultimate limit state. This means that our software effectively bridges the gap between hand-type analysis methods (perhaps automated in a simple software application or spreadsheet) and significantly more complex tools (e.g. non-linear finite element analysis), which respectively over-simplify the problem or require significant user expertise and computational resources.
Our software is also designed to have industry leading levels of ease of use, reducing training needs,
and all our software is extensively validated against a wide range of benchmark problems.
Our users
LimitState clients range from large corporations, government bodies and infrastructure owners to small engineering consultants and contractors, based in over 30 countries worldwide. Our software is also used widely for research and teaching by many hundreds of academic users at top institutions around the world.