Test cell structure raised off the lawn on T-Block screw foundations: under the floor you can see the steel shafts with their helices still visible, in the long grass.

About us · Research

Research and testing

Before it was a catalogue product, T-Block^® was an innovation to be tested.

Since 2011 universities and research projects have used our screw foundations to hold up real prototypes, in competition or under measurement, where there was no room to fix a mistake. This page brings those projects together.

Those who put us to the test had no interest in making us look good

A company can describe its product however it likes. A research group cannot: it chooses a solution because it needs it to hold, uses it under its own name and answers for it before a jury or a measurement campaign.

The four projects below were born that way. All of them had the same constraint: to build on land that had to remain available and intact, on a schedule set by others, without opening a concrete foundation site.

They are also among the projects where this technology was tested hardest, and that is where everything else came from: what holds a solar array or a carport today was refined under a university test cell and on a competition site in Madrid.

Four projects, four ways of testing them

A measuring cell, two international competitions, a lived-in house. Different ground, climates and clients, the same foundation principle.

University of Florence research test cell on a lawn: a module clad in timber battens with glazing and ventilation grilles, raised off the ground on T-Block screw foundations.

2011 — 2012

Abitare Mediterraneo — the University of Florence test cell

University of Florence · Tuscan regional project POR CREO FESR, 12 companies

A test cell is not a building: it is a measuring instrument. It records temperatures, flows and energy use over whole seasons, and the data are only valid if the structure stays still and unchanged. The screw foundations set it level on a lawn with no slab and no digging, in an area that had to stay as it was.

The test cell is still there, on the same anchors.

About thirty T-Block ground screws installed in a park along the outline of the future test cell, all with their heads at the same height. — February 2012, before assembly: the foundations are already set out and all at the same height. The test cell was then placed on these points.

The MED IN ITALY prototype seen from above at Solar Decathlon Europe in Madrid: photovoltaic roof, timber terrace, shade sails and a vegetable garden.

2012

Solar Decathlon Europe — MED IN ITALY, Madrid

Roma Tre University + Sapienza · 3rd place in the Architecture contest

The competition rules are a tough test for a foundation: the house arrives in pieces, is assembled in a few days on a shared competition site, is judged, and at the end the area must be handed back exactly as it was. No concrete is allowed, and the jury date does not move.

Prototype assembled, judged and dismantled within the competition schedule.

Close-up of a T-Block ground screw driven into gravelly ground, helix visible, carrying the timber structure of the house through a bolted plate.

2013

The WARA project — the first Italian house on screw foundations

The step from prototype to real home. Not a show model to be taken down after a few days, but a real house where levelling was done with the T-Block instead of on the ground.

No concrete poured, no earthworks on the slope.

Solar Decathlon Africa in Benguerir: two flanged heads of T-Block ground screws in the red earth, with the timber walls of the prototype behind.

2019

Solar Decathlon Africa — Benguerir, Morocco

Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tangier (FSTT + ENSAT) · first African edition of the competition

Dry, stony ground, a site thousands of kilometres away, student teams assembling for the first time and a fixed time window. The foundations left Italy and were screwed into the Benguerir desert just as it was: no water for concrete, no curing to wait for.

The first and only Italian company taking part in the contest, and probably the first screw foundation installed on African soil.

Entrance to Solar Decathlon Africa 2019 in Benguerir: the sign with the dates, 13-27 September 2019, and the prototypes in the background. — The entrance to the competition site in Benguerir. An experience of exchange and innovation.

The common thread

Why an experimental project does not use concrete

It is not a matter of preference. These are four constraints that come up in every research project, and a poured foundation struggles to meet all of them at once.

The date does not move

In a competition or a measurement campaign the calendar is set in advance. Concrete imposes its curing time; a screw foundation takes load as soon as it is installed, and assembly starts the same day.

The site must be handed back

Competition sites, university parks and land lent for an experiment go back to whoever lent them. An anchor is unscrewed and taken away: there is no buried block left to break out and dispose of.

There is no building site

Often there is nothing: no water, no concrete mixers, no access for heavy vehicles. Installation needs one machine and a small crew, and the materials arrive together with the structure.

The structure is the instrument

If the prototype is there to measure something, differential settlement spoils the data. The support is adjusted on the nuts during assembly, and its level can be rechecked over time without touching the ground.

The testing continues on the numbers

The capacities we publish are not sales figures: they come from the established formulas of the geotechnical literature for helical foundations — bearing capacity of the helices, the Hoyt-Clemence method for tension, Broms for lateral load — applied to the real geometry of each model and reduced by safety factors.

The rated value is a starting point; checking the specific project and characterising the ground remain the designer's responsibility, under the Italian NTC 2018 standards.

For designers

Technical area — data sheets, capacity tables and calculation documents.
Configurator — the right model for your load and ground, with capacity values.
How it works — the anchoring principle and the installation steps.
Our story — the full timeline from 2003 to today.

Building a prototype?

Universities, spin-offs, research groups and design practices: if you need to set a structure on land that must be handed back as it was, with a fixed deadline and no building site, send us the project. We reply with the anchoring layout and the capacity values for your ground.

Tell us about your project