Rehabilitation of a distressed steel roof truss - A study

• Published in: Structural engineering and mechanics pp. 567 - 576
• Main Authors: M.A. Dar, N. Subramanian, A.R. Dar, J. Raju
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 국제구조공학회 10-06-2017
• Subjects: 토목공학
• ISSN: 1225-4568
• DOI: 10.12989/sem.2017.62.5.567

Structural failures are undesirable events that devastate the construction industry resulting in loss of life, injury, huge property loss, and also affect the economy of the region. Roof truss failures occur mainly due to excessive loading, improper fabrication, deterioration, inadequate repair, etc. Although very rare, a roof truss may even fail due to inappropriate location of supports. One such case was reported from the recent failure of a steel roof truss used in an indoor stadium at Kargil in India. Kargil region, being mountainous in nature, receives heavy snowfall and hence the steel roof trusses are designed for heavy snow loads. Due to inappropriate support location, the indoor stadium’s steel roof truss had failed under heavy snow load for which it was designed and became an interesting structural engineering problem. The failure observed was primarily in terms of yielding of the bottom chord under the supports, leading to partial collapse of the roof truss. This paper summarizes the results of laboratory tests and analytical studies that focused on the validation of the proposed remedial measure for rehabilitating this distressed steel roof truss. The study presents the evaluation of (i) significant reduction in strength and stiffness of the distressed truss resulting in its failure, (ii) desired recovery in both strength and stiffness of the rectified truss contributed by the proposed remedial measure. Three types of models i.e., ideal truss model, as build truss model and rectified truss model were fabricated and tested under monotonic loading. The structural configuration and support condition varied in all the three models to represent the ideal truss, distressed truss and the rectified truss. To verify the accuracy of the experimental results, an analytical study was carried out and the results of this analytical study are compared with the experimental ones. KCI Citation Count: 0