Effects of Material Changes on the Performance of Industrial Trusses: A Simulation Approach

For many years, trusses have served as one of the excellent load carrying members for domestic and industrial buildings, and are becoming more-and-more useful day-by-day. Considering these facts Present research work is devoted to the investigations on the performance evaluation of trusses under different materials. For this purpose, three industrial trusses, namely, Howe truss, Pratt truss and Warren truss are designed, and performance parameters, maximum compressive force, maximum tensile force, maximum, shear, maximum bending moment under compression and node displacement for each alternative under two different materials, hot rolled steel and cold forged steel, are investigated. In next step, in order to get common ranking, a well known statistical technique, coefficient of variance is used. Results of the research work show the suitability of cold forged steel for truss making applications. Results also show that cold forged Warren truss shows the best performance out of the available alternatives.