Civil and Environmental Engineering
Date of this Version
2018
Citation
Early AM, Mohammadi ME, Wood RL, Peterman DK. (2018). Behavior of Cold-Formed Steel Metal Industrial Buildings. Wei-Wen Yu International Specialty Conference on Cold-Formed Steel Structures 2018, St. Louis, MO, November 7-8, 2018
Abstract
This paper presents research focused on understanding the observed behavior of cold-formed steel (CFS) metal buildings during Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall Friday, August 25, 2017 between Port Aransas and Port O’Connor, Texas. Through the Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance (GEER) association (funded by the National Science Foundation) a team of structural engineers and researchers performed rapid and detailed assessments of structural damage caused by the hurricane. The National Science Foundation gathered photographs, damage assessments sheets, and three-dimensional laser point cloud data of severely damaged cold-formed steel industrial buildings. The Port Aransas County Airport experienced severe damage to several cold-formed steel small aircraft hangars. The failure of one of these hangars is the basis for this investigation. The laser point cloud data was utilized to create a model of a hangar structure in MASTAN2. Multiple analyses were completed in MASTAN2 to determine the failure mode and damage propagation mechanisms. Also, analyses were completed to determine the behavior of the undamaged structure and the structure after loss of the hangar doors. The objective of this research is to determine the behavior of cold-formed steel structures under extreme loads to form recommendations for future construction. Furthermore, this work is among the first to use post-disaster data to examine structural cold-formed steel performance.