Reliability of Steel Truss Roof Systems Under Variable Snow Load Profiles

Abstract

The probabilistic safety analysis of steel truss roof systems under variable snow load profiles is investigated. The roofs of structures such as industrial buildings or sports halls, which require wide areas, are frequently subjected to unexpectedly high loads. Therefore, compared to the residential buildings, that type of buildings often comes across failure or prohibition of usage. Probabilistic techniques are utilized for the analysis of the problem. Thirty-six steel roof structures with different structural dimensions and load variations are modelled and their failure probabilities are calculated. In this paper, a complicated stochastic analysis is reduced to the solution of a load–resistance (S–R) problem by utilizing sensitivity analyses. Firstly, the structures were designed through structural analyses, and then the sensitivity analyses were conducted to understand the response of the structure to the load and to the span-length parameters. In this paper, a reliability study which gradually monitors the effect of geometrical parameters on the failure trend is presented. Three different snow load distribution functions were used. The relation between failure, and load or structural dimension variations was investigated. The results obtained in this study are discussed and compared with the results from the literature for similar structures subjected to snow loads. It is observed that for the snow load distributions with high standard deviations the structural reliability indices may give results below the target safety levels of the design codes. Finally, the assessment of the results shows that the effect of the standard deviation of the snow load on failure probability is much more than the effect of intensity of the nominal snow load.