Prefabricated steel structures for low-rise buildings in seismic areas (Precasteel).
Date: 2013-04-15
Institutions: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation
Subjects: building materials, building safety, earthquake, industrial research, iron and steel industry, materials technology, metal structure, research report, steel, testing

Low-rise  buildings  are  used  for  industrial  and  commercial  activities.  Most  of 
these  buildings  are  built  by  prefabricated-concrete  elements  characterised  by 
low efficiency of connections and a lower ductility performance when subjected 
to earthquake loading.

The proposal aim is defining prefabricated steel solutions for single-storey and 
low-rise  buildings  in  earthquake-prone  areas  for  industrial  and  commercial 
activities.  The  selection  of  structural  solutions  is  performed  via  statistical 
analyses  in  different  European  countries  about  solutions  requested  by  the 
market. Industrial and commercial solutions are optimised in terms of structural 
performance  and  of  construction  costs  and  two  of  those  (technologically 
advance  and  high-performing)  are  experimentally  tested.  The  solution 
selected for commercial activities is a dissipative device working in series with 
prefabricated  RC-Wall  and  pendulum  steel-structure.  The  solution  selected  for 
industrial  activities  is  a  warehousing  system  using  cold-formed  profiles  acting 
compositely with ribbed steel sheeting as girder web.

Automated integrated design software with cost-effectiveness analysis module 
is  realised  to  favour  the  use  of  proposed  solutions  into  practice.  Solutions 
proposed by the software are optimised to meet three ‘criteria’:

(1)   Prefabrication — structural members and connection types selected in order 

to reduce on-site operations;

(2)   Pre-designed  —  structural  solutions  pre-designed  and  inserted  in  a 
database  correlating  member/structure  with  its  maximum  structural 
performance; structural configuration for industrial/commercial buildings are 
assembled according to the design inputs;

(3)   Standardised  —  members  and  structural  systems  have  static  schemes 
suitable  for  defining  simplified  designing  procedures  (transformed  in 
technical tables — Precasteel Software): database (catalogue) of solutions/
members may be enlarged enclosing more recent developments.

Studies and reports

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Prefabricated steel 
structures for low-rise 
buildings in seismic areas
(Precasteel)

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doi:10.2777/5499 

Research and 
Innovation 

EUR 25871 EN

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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EUROPEAN COMMISSION 
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 
Directorate G — Industrial Technologies 
Unit G.5 — Research Fund for Coal and Steel

E-mail: rtd-steel-coal@ec.europa.eu 

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