Steel Design

Understanding Steel Design

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Ever wondered how tall buildings, warehouses, schools, bridges, ships, stadiums, and anything of the like are built? Well, there is an area of structural engineering that is very efficient and now highly used to design steel structures. They call it… structural steel design.

What is steel design?

Steel design, or structural steel design, is a branch of structural engineering that deals with the design of steel structures. The main purpose of structural steel design is to check the viability of steel for any kind of project. Structural safety provides a lot of benefits, not to mention it is where building plans rely on.

Importance of steel design in the engineering industry:

Understanding steel design provides facts and benefits that will help in comprehending the inherent connection between the characteristics of materials and the building design. This is critical in the engineering industry. Steel construction employs systematic education of both traditional and specialized construction processes in the development of innovative solutions.

Methods of steel structure design:

There are three different methods for the design of steel structures:

  • Simple design
    • This is the most traditional and commonly used approach in steel design. Except for nominal moments arising from eccentricity at joints, no moment is believed to be transferred from one connected member to another. Here, joints are idealized as perfect pins.
  • Continuous design
    • This type of design is more complex compared to simple design therefore software is commonly used to analyze the frame. The frame’s sway resistance is provided via frame action (i.e. by bending of beams and columns). Continuous design is a method of steel structure design that assumes that joints are rigid and that there is no relative rotation of connected members occurs whatever the applied moment.
  • Semi-continuous steel design
    • The most complex method is semi-continuous design as the real joint is more realistically presented. However, there are two simplified procedures that exist for both braced and unbraced frames; (i) The wind moment method, for unbraced frames. This procedure assumes the beam/column joints to be pinned when considering gravity loads. However, they are believed to be rigid under wind loading, which means that lateral stresses are handled via frame action. (ii) When it comes to braced frames, the true joint behavior is taken into account in this technique to lessen the bending moments and deflections imparted to the beams.

In the engineering industry, it is safe to say that steels are a game-changer. Not only does it have a lot of benefits, but it’s also pretty flexible too with a lot of different methods to approach with.

References:

https://www.construction21.org/articles/h/the-importance-of-structural-steel-in-constructing-buildings.html

http://www.fao.org/3/i2433e/i2433e04.pdf

What are Methods of Steel Structure Design?

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