The Company

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.

Since being spun out from the University of Sheffield 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.

LimitState Software 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.