Design carried out in-house, by the same company that will install, stress and grout the slab
In-house structural design
Post Tension Design Services UAE In-House PT Slab, Beam and Transfer Girder Design
Every decision that determines whether a post-tensioned building is economical gets made at design stage. How thick the slab is. Where the tendons run and how they curve through the depth. How many columns the floor plate needs. Once those are fixed, the rest of the project is execution, and no amount of good site work recovers a slab that was over-designed by 40mm on every floor.
We provide post tension design services across the UAE: PT slab and beam design, transfer girder design, structural optimisation, and the shop drawings and calculations the site builds from. The work is done in-house, by the same company that then supplies, installs, stresses and grouts. Our base is Ajman and our DED Ajman licence covers every emirate. Each emirate has its own page on this site for local market context: Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Ras Al Khaimah, Fujairah and Umm Al Quwain.
Licensed by DED Ajman, License No. 127328. PTI certified.
Structural optimisation that reduces concrete and steel quantities rather than simply satisfying the code
Shop drawings and calculations produced in-house, so drawing revisions do not wait on a third party
Real design range delivered, from single residential buildings to an 11-level structure with two parking floors
Ajman track record
Where Does Premium Post Tension's Design Experience Come From?
Our design work is unusual in one specific respect: we find out whether it was right. Most design offices issue drawings and hear nothing further unless something goes wrong. Because we install and stress what we design, every tendon profile we specify gets tested by our own crews within weeks, and every elongation reading is a direct verdict on the assumptions behind it.
That feedback loop has run across four buildings in Ajman. In Al Yasmeen, in the Eastern Sector, two adjacent G+M+4+R residential buildings. In Al Jurf, in the Northern Sector, a G+4+R residential building and an 11-level structure built as G+2P+8T+R including two parking floors. Four designs, four sets of shop drawings, four buildings that went up.
Recent project evidence
Which Post-Tension Designs Have We Recently Delivered?
Real design ranges from four completed Ajman buildings, shown without overstating the record.
Two residential buildings, Al Yasmeen
Roughly 4,200 and 4,300 square metres of post-tensioned slab, both G+M+4+R. Two plots, similar buildings, and a useful demonstration that a near-identical brief still produces two distinct designs once each plot's geometry is worked through.
An 11-level structure with parking, Al Jurf
About 9,340 square metres, G+2P+8T+R. This is the most demanding design in our record, because parking floors and residential floors want different things. A car park wants a column grid that suits parking bays and carries heavier point loads. The residential floors above want a grid that suits apartments. Reconciling those two through a transfer level is precisely the problem post-tensioning exists to solve.
A G+4+R residential building, Al Jurf
Roughly 3,570 square metres, a more conventional design brief.
220mm to 280mm slabs
Across these four designs, slab thicknesses landed between 220mm and 280mm and steel ratios between 55 and 80 kg per cubic metre. Those spreads are the design doing its job. A single standard slab thickness applied across four different buildings would have meant over-designing at least three of them.
Technical expertise
What Does a Post-Tension Design Actually Have to Resolve?
Seven connected decisions determine whether the design is safe, economical and buildable.
Slab depth against span and load
The headline decision, and the one with the largest cost consequence. Every extra 10mm of slab depth is concrete, self-weight, foundation load and money, repeated on every floor. Too shallow and deflection or cracking becomes the problem instead. The design has to find the depth that satisfies strength, deflection and crack control without paying for margin nobody asked for.
Tendon profile
Tendons follow a curve through the slab depth, high over supports and low at mid-span. That curvature is what generates the upward load that balances part of the slab's own weight. The profile is the design, in a real sense, and getting it right is what separates an efficient post-tensioned slab from an expensive flat one.
Load balancing
Post-tensioning is usually designed so the tendon force offsets a chosen proportion of the permanent load. How much to balance is a genuine design judgement, and it drives the whole steel quantity.
Transfer structures
Where a column grid changes between floors, as it does above a car park, a transfer girder or transfer slab carries the load across. These are high-force elements and among the most demanding post-tensioned members to design correctly.
Anchorage zones
The region behind each anchor carries extremely concentrated force. Bursting reinforcement and anchor spacing are designed for it. This is one of the more common places where a generic design goes wrong.
Buildability
A design that cannot be built as drawn is not a design. Because our own crews install what we specify, chair spacing, tendon congestion at column heads and clashes with reinforcement get resolved on the drawing rather than argued about on the deck.
Shop drawings and calculations
Produced in-house and issued in the form the consultant and the site actually need, including the calculated elongation figures our stressing crews will later check their measurements against.
See our Installation service for how these drawings get built from on site.
Seven-stage workflow
How Does Our Design Process Move From Brief to Shop Drawings?
Each stage keeps technical intent, consultant approval and site buildability connected.
Step 01Review the architectural intent and structural brief
Spans, column positions, floor loading, usage per level, and any constraints already fixed by the architecture.
Step 02Assess whether post-tensioning is the right call
Not every slab benefits. If conventional reinforced concrete suits the building better, we would rather say so at this stage than design something the project did not need.
Step 03Preliminary sizing and optimisation
Slab depth, tendon layout and load-balancing options are compared. This is where the savings are found, and where a design either earns its fee several times over or does not.
Step 04Detailed design and calculations
Full analysis against strength, deflection, crack control and anchorage requirements.
Step 05Shop drawings and detailing
Tendon layouts, profiles, chair schedules, anchorage details and reinforcement interfaces, drawn to be built from.
Step 06Consultant submission and response
Drawings and calculations issued for approval, with comments addressed directly by the people who did the design.
Step 07Support through construction
Design queries during installation and stressing are answered by the same team, which is the point of keeping design in-house.
See Installation and Stressing Operations for the stages that build from these drawings.
The tendon profile is the design. Everything else is confirming that it works.
7-stage workflow40+ projects designed1 in-house team
Credentials
Is Premium Post Tension Qualified to Design Post-Tensioned Structures?
Licence and certification documentation is available on request with any design proposal.
DED Ajman trade licence No. 127328
Registered for concrete works and pre-tension construction units building and execution works.
PTI certified
We work to Post-Tensioning Institute practice, the reference standard for post-tensioning design, materials, installation and grouting.
In-house design capability
Shop drawings and detailing are produced in-house rather than subcontracted.
Established 2024
40+ completed projects and a team of over 50.
Why clients choose us
Why Do Consultants Work With Our In-House Design Team?
The most useful thing about our design work is that it is accountable to itself. A design office that never sees its drawings built has no mechanism for learning which of its assumptions were conservative and which were optimistic. Ours gets audited every time a stressing crew records an elongation figure against a calculated one.
The second is response time on queries. When a question comes off the deck about tendon congestion at a column head, it goes to the person who drew it, not into a submission queue at another firm. Projects lose more days to slow design responses than to slow site work.
The third is that optimisation is genuinely in our interest to get right. We are not paid more for specifying a thicker slab. We are, however, the ones who then have to install into whatever we specified, which is a strong incentive to design something buildable and economical rather than something merely safe on paper. With more than 40 completed projects since 2024 and a team of over 50, that has covered everything from a single residential building to an 11-level structure with two parking floors and the transfer condition between them.
Design questions
FAQs About Post-Tension Design for UAE Buildings
All of the UAE. Our DED Ajman licence covers every emirate, and Ajman is where most of our completed projects are. Each emirate has its own page on this site.
It depends on the spans, the loading and the geometry, so any single number is misleading. As a real reference, our recent designs have landed between 220mm and 280mm. The correct figure for a specific building comes out of the design, and finding it accurately is most of the value of doing the design properly.
Yes, and it is a common request. We will review the existing design and report honestly on whether meaningful savings are available. Sometimes there are none, and we would rather say that than manufacture a reason to redesign.
The system suits the structure rather than the other way round, and the choice is made as part of the design against the building's requirements and the project specification.
Yes. Post-tensioning earns its place on longer spans, thinner slabs, fewer columns and transfer conditions. On a small building with short spans, conventional reinforced concrete is often the better answer, and recommending post-tensioning anyway would be a short-sighted way to win one job.
Start your project
Ready to Have Your Slab Designed or Value-Engineered?
Send the architectural drawings and the structural brief. We will tell you whether post-tensioning suits the building, roughly what slab depth it implies, and where the savings are likely to sit.
Phone+971 56 530 0632
Emailinfo@premiumpt.ae
Premium Post Tension Concrete WorksBuilding 2, Plot 0687, Shop 3, Al Alia, Ajman, United Arab Emirates
HoursSaturday to Thursday: 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM
Friday: Closed
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