Critical Design Criteria for Standard, Truncated, and Parallel Chords Cold-Formed Steel Trusses

Abstract

The design of cold-formed steel trusses can be a very complicated and long repetitive process involving up to 28 load combinations added to serviceability checks depending on the design standards being used. This process is particularly tedious if a near optimal solution is required. Additionally, the risk of introducing human errors is usually quite high as it is a process often done by hand. FRAMECAD Structure is a niche software solution born from the desire to provide a complete solution for constructing with cold-formed steel by a company selling roll-forming machines. FRAMECAD Structure specialises on automating the calculations and design of cold-formed steel framed panels, trusses and joists with minimal user input. However, computational-oriented software applications are often not optimised for performance, hence the inefficiency in obtaining a design solution, i.e. the proposed solution is either not optimal or takes a considerable time to compute. To provide guidelines on the design of cold-formed trusses, this research uses FRAMECAD Structure to study which design parameters are critical and what impact they have on optimising the design outcome