The standing seam panel is one of the most practical and economical roofing systems developed in recent years. Construction of the roof system requires that the panel legs be overlapped and crimped. Under gravity load, the crimped outstanding leg of the connected panels may be subject to distortional buckling. A design method was previously suggested for estimating the distortional buckling strength of the outstanding leg of a single simply supported standing seam panel. In this paper, an approximate method is present for estimating the capacity of a system of interconnected continuous span standing seam panels. Experimental results for three full-scale continuous span tests and one full-scale simple span test sbow that the approximate method provides a relatively accurate estimate the maximum capacity for a system subject to gravity load
