Castalia

Castalia srl is a software house and an engineering consultant company working in the field of structural engineering. It was founded in 1991 by young structural engineers coming from the Politecnico di Milano: Giorgio Borré, who left the Company in 1995, and Paolo Rugarli. The company was founded mainly due to the software development of the program Sargon, which has been sold across the whole Italy as engineering tool related to the design, check and analysis of steel structures, but, afterwards, its expertise spread in engineering consulting in structural analysis, ad hoc software development, and scholarship in the structural analysis field. Developing software is a very important mean to reach a deep knowledge in the field of structural analysis and a very important tool to fully understand Code application problems and matters. The work of Castalia led to several publications and books which have been widely used in Italy by Engineers, Consultants, Students and Companies working in this field (finite elements, modal analysis, EN 1993 Eurocode 3, EN 1995 Eurocode 5, Italian seismic standards, thin walled (cold formed) member checking, cross-section classification, limit states combinations, are several of the many issues covered by Castalia's publication, and signed by Paolo Rugarli). Our main goal is to deepen all issues regarding structural analysis and steel structures in particular. Software development and consulting are the main ways we carry on our work. Our research has been mainly directed toward steel structures. A ten-years project about steel joint, steel connections automatic checking has recently been released and is quickly growing (CSE), reaching the very important goal of allowing free placement of components (members, throughs and joiners) in automatic computed steel joints. In Italy Castalia reached very important goals and is recognized as one of the most authoritative Italian software company in the field of structural engineering, also because Castalia always refused a commercial approach to the marketing of its software, maintaining a very high technical profile. Several papers prepared by Castalia pointed out serious problems in Italian standards and helped in better defining the correct way to apply coded rules.