Patent Application
20190194945
The present invention relates to the design and construction of truss-based structures, and more particularly to use of prefabricated trusses of predetermined load capacity during such the design and construction.
Trusses are commonly used in the construction industry. Trusses are typically consisted of an upper chord element and a lower chord element inter connected by plurality of web members. Trusses are used in variety of structures from bridges to residential houses. Specially in buildings, it is common to combine identical trusses with equal spacing to create a load-resisting system such as roof of residential houses or frame of fabric buildings.
In the case of combining identical trusses, it is common to prefabricate the trusses in a manufacturing shop and transfer them as a whole unit or in several parts to the construction site. Prefabricating trusses provides superior quality control, cost efficiency and precision compared to the construction in the job site.
In some fields of application, such as housing and fabric buildings, truss manufactures provide a variety of pre-designed trusses with defined load capacity to be used in typical loading situations. Moreover, some truss manufacturers provide modular truss systems that can be combined to accommodate to variety of structural geometries. The modular systems, for example, are common in the field of pre-made tubular arched steel trusses used as the load resisting systems in fabric buildings.
In such cases the modular systems are optimised for a variety of typical loading scenarios; however, the optimization for every load combination is not possible. Therefore, there might be load cases that result in localized failure of one or a few elements of the truss assembly under extreme loading while the rest of the elements are still far from their maximum allowable capacity. Since factory-level customization of the truss for each individual case may not be cost effective, in most cases the solution is to increase the number of trusses in length of the building by reducing the bay spacing (i.e. the distance from one truss assembly to the next). This will result in a structure in which the majority of trusses are over-designed relative to their experienced loads just to correct overloading of a small subset of the trusses that might otherwise fail.
Therefore, this conventional practice of increasing the overall number of trusses and reducing the bay spacing between trusses can be considered inefficient from both a cost and materials standpoint.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide improved or alternative approaches to construction projects using prefabricated trusses.
According to a first aspect of the invention, there is provided a stiffener for augmenting a prefabricated truss having first and second chords and a plurality of web members spanning between said first and second chords, said stiffener comprising a shank having opposing first and second ends, a first sleeve connected or connectable to said shank at the first end thereof and operable to close around a first portion of the prefabricated truss at or adjacent the first chord of the prefabricated truss, and a second sleeve connected or connectable to said shank at the second end thereof and operable to close around a second portion of the prefabricated truss at or adjacent the second chord of the prefabricated truss.
According to a second aspect of the invention, there is provided a method of customizing a prefabricated truss having a predetermined loading capacity, said method comprising determining load capacity requirements for an intended application of said prefabricated truss, and if said load capacity requirements exceed said predetermined loading capacity, prescribing installation of an auxiliary stiffener to said prefabricated truss to augment existing web members of said truss that spans between first and second chords of said truss, thereby increasing the loading capacity of said prefabricated truss.
According to a third aspect of the invention, there is provided a method of constructing a truss-based structure, said method comprising obtaining a collection of prefabricated trusses each having a predetermined load capacity, installing one or more auxiliary stiffeners on a subset of said collection for which said predetermined load capacity is exceeded by loading requirements of the truss based structure being constructed.
Preferred embodiments of the present invention employ use of a simple and easily installed stiffener to strengthen only vulnerable elements of a truss-based structure without the need for increasing the overall number of trusses in the structure. This approach can be used to significantly reduced the material used in the building, which in turn can decrease the cost, construction time and weight of the structure.
Embodiments of the present invention employ the stiffener to strengthen a chord member at an overloaded location determined through structural analysis by firstly providing additional lateral stability, and secondly providing a load path to distribute the load in overloaded section to other parts of the truss, typically the chord on the opposite side. In other words, once installed, the stiffener is interacting with the other original components of the truss as an additional web member that supplements the original web members of the prefabricated truss.
As mentioned earlier, many prefabricated truss manufacturers provide a series of pre-designed trusses with preset geometrical configuration to reduce the need for custom made trusses to reduce the cost. This is an effective way to increase efficiency of the prefabricated trusses. In order to follow the same approach, embodiments of the present invention employ versatility to accommodate a wide range of main truss geometries.
Embodiments of the present invention are therefore useful:
Before actual construction of a building or other structure with such modular truss arches, a computer implemented mathematical model of the structure is created using suitable analytical modelling software, and then subject to finite element analysis under simulated loading conditions, for example which may be based on prescribed building codes of a particular jurisdiction in which the structure is to be erected.
The conventional solution to such anticipated failure detection would be to increase the number of arch assemblies used in the mathematical model of the structure, and reduce the bay spacing between each pair of adjacent arch assemblies of the model so that the simulated load is distributed among a greater number of structural arches. The load simulation is then repeated, and if no failures are detected, then this increased number of arches and reduced bay spacing is prescribed for the actual physical construction of the structure.
In the present invention, rather than increase the number of arches, the failed truss in the computer model is instead remodelled with an additional web member to stiffen the arch and reinforce the chord thereof at the location thereon at which the anticipated failure was detected in the original simulation. While the other modeled trusses remain in their original unmodified form reflecting the truss manufacturer's normal prefabricated truss, the remodelled truss with the additional web member added to the prefab model thus represents a customized truss of increased loading capacity for the particular application being designed for.
The loading simulation is repeated with the customized truss model in place among the other unmodified prefab truss models of the overall structural model. If no anticipated failure is detected in this re-iteration of the simulated loading analysis, then the physical production of a customized truss matching the custom truss model is prescribed for the construction of the physical truss-based structure.
However, rather than requiring modification of the standardized manufacture of the prefabricated trusses to generate such a one-off customized truss, the present invention instead employs the installation of a novel auxiliary stiffener onto a standard prefabricated truss in order to serve as the added web member prescribed by the analytical model to meet the particular project's loading requirements.
The appended drawings show numerous possible implementations of the auxiliary stiffener to be used at the anticipated locations of localized truss failure indicated by the structural analysis to increase the capacity of that particular area. The primary components of the stiffener include two sleeves 22, 24 connected together by a length-adjustable shank 26. The sleeves lock around portions of the prefabricated truss at or near the upper and lower chords 12, 14 thereof. The length of the shank is adjusted according to the distance between the chords in the particular truss being customized with the stiffener. The length adjustability of the shank thus enables use of the stiffener of on trusses of different height.
As outlined in more detail below with reference to the different illustrated embodiments, the shank can reside at a fixed 90-degree angle with respect to the sleeves, or at any other fixed or adjustable angle. Moreover, installation of the stiffener can be implemented by a single sleeve on each chord, or by a single sleeve on one chord in conjunction with multiple sleeves on the opposite chord, in which case multiple shanks are used to connect the single sleeve on the first chord to each of the sleeves on the opposite second chord.
Also, while the examples provided in the accompany drawings are illustrated in relation to two-dimensional planar trusses, it will be appreciated that the principles of the present invention may also be effectively used in a three-dimensional spatial truss as well. Likewise, the illustrated embodiments are presented in an exemplary context only, and other variations on the illustrated designs may be employed within the scope of the present invention.
The linear first sleeve in the first embodiment has a two-piece construction, with a first shank-attached sleeve member 22a and a first cooperating sleeve member 22b selectively fastenable to the first shank-attached sleeve member 22a. In use of the stiffener, the shank-attached sleeve member 22a embraces the inner side 12a of the upper chord that faces the lower chord, while the cooperating sleeve member 22b embraces the opposing outer side 12b of the upper chord. The two sleeve members thus cooperatively form a closed sleeve around the upper chord 12 of the prefabricated truss.
To enable this fastening together of the two sleeve members 22a, 22b around the upper chord 12 of the truss, each sleeve member 22a, 22b features a central cradle-shaped arcuate span 28 of semi-cylindrical form, and a pair of fastening flanges 30 jutting laterally outward from the central span 28 at the opposite ends of the central span's arcuate cross-section. Threaded screw or bolt fasteners 32 are passed through aligned holes in the fastening flanges 30 of the two sleeve members and are respectively mated with matching threaded nuts 34 in order to tighten the first sleeve in closed condition around the upper chord 12 of the truss 10e.
The V-shaped second sleeve 24 in the first embodiment has a second shank-attached sleeve member 24a of V-shaped configuration having two wings or halves 36, 38 that diverge from one another on opposite sides of the shank 26 toward the opposing first end of the shank. Each wing of the V-shaped shank-attached sleeve member 24a has the same cradle and flange structure described above for the linear first sleeve 22. Instead of a singular cooperating sleeve member like that of the linear sleeve 22, the V-shaped sleeve 24 instead features a pair of cooperating sleeve members 24b, 24c, one for each wing or half of the V-shaped shank-attached sleeve member 24a. Each cooperating sleeve member 24b, 24c once again has the same cradle and flange structure as the other sleeve members, but is of shorter axial length than the singular cooperating sleeve member 22b of the linear sleeve 22. Each cooperating sleeve member 24b, 24c is fastened to a respective wing or half 36, 38 of the V-shaped shank-attached sleeve member 24a.
The mechanism used to adjust the height or length of the shank 26 that interconnects the sleeves is also shown in
As described above, each sleeve is tightened by means of a series of threaded fasteners and nuts on opposite sides of the truss component (chord, web member) to which the sleeve is clamped. The number of bolts on the sleeves is calculated based on the required clamping force and fixity of the sleeves. In the illustrated example, the clamping configuration uses three bolts on each side of the first linear sleeve and two bolts on each side of each wing of the second V-shaped sleeve. Alternatively, each sleeve or wing may be tightened by as few as one bolt on each side of the sleeve/wing. The first configuration using multiple fasteners per side provides some level of resistance against moment and provides relatively stiffer connection compared to the second single-fastener configuration.
A layer of thin rubber padding 46 may be placed between each sleeve member or wing and the chord or web member around which the sleeve is closed. This can be beneficial to increase the resistance against slippage of the sleeve along the chord or web member. Moreover, the rubber pad 46 can prevent possible damage to the main truss members that can occur during fastening of the sleeves' nuts due to mismatch between the exterior surface of the truss chord/web and the concave surfaces of the sleeve cradles that could occur due to imperfections in the manufacture of the sleeves.
In the first embodiment shown in
In the first two embodiments, at least one of the sleeves was positioned at the intersection of the web members with one of the truss chords, in which case the original web members of the truss provide lateral constraint to resist or prevent the sleeves from sliding along the chord's axis. If no such lateral constraint is available from body of the main truss, the sleeves may be secured in their position on the chords by providing increased frictional resistance between the sleeves and the chords. In such case, the friction between the chord's surface material and the thin rubber pads 46 preferably included inside the sleeves, or between chord's surface material and the sleeve's surface material if no internal pad is provided, can be increased by tightening the fasteners 32 to increase the clamping force.
Alternatively, the sleeves may be permanently attached to the chords by welding to prevent slippage of the sleeves. However, fastener-based clamping of the sleeves without welded attachment may be preferable to minimize the need for skilled welder installation of the stiffener, and/or minimize the need to install the stiffener in a workshop, factory or other particularly equipped environment. Purely fastened installation of the stiffener maximizes the ease of in-situ installation of the stiffener at the construction site of the building or other structure without specialized labour. This way, a manufacturer, supplier or distributor need not pre-install the stiffeners, and can simply ship, deliver or supply the builder with a customized modular kit that provides the exact necessary collection of prefabricated trusses for assembly, plus the exact number of necessary stiffeners prescribed by the structural analysis.
For example, a building or structural contractor may obtain the building/structural design constraints (building size, etc.) from a customer, determine a required collection of prefabricated trusses required, build the analytical model and run the simulations thereon to identify one or more trusses that will require stiffening, and then place an order form the manufacturer, supplier or distributor that includes the necessary collection of prefabricated trusses, and the required number of stiffeners to be delivered to the construction site. No specialized manufacturing costs are incurred, and the size and weight of the relatively small stiffeners compared to the trusses themselves reduces shipping costs compared to the conventional solution of ordering an increased quantity of trusses.
In the preceding embodiments, the shank-attached sleeve members are rigidly fixed to the shank at a static angle.
Alternatively, the two shanks 26″ may be interpreted as two legs of a double-legged or bifurcated shank, each parallel leg of which incorporates a respective length adjustment mechanism to enable expansion and collapse of the stiffener's height.
The two offset shanks or legs 26″ are thus laterally spaced apart from one another so that this gap space between the shanks can accommodate an existing original web-member 16b of the prefabricated truss between the two shanks when the stiffener is installed on the truss, as shown in
The illustrated example of the offset multi-shank (or bifurcated single-shank) embodiment in
The preferably length-adjustable nature of the shank in each of the preceding embodiments is not only useful in relation to adjustment of the stiffener size to fit trusses of different height, but also enables insertion of the shank and the shank-attached sleeve members into the inter-chord space of the truss while the shank is in a collapsed state, whereupon the length adjustment mechanism is used to expand the shank and force each of the shank-attached sleeve members into abutment against the respective chord or web members. At this point, the cooperating sleeve members are then fastened in place to complete the installation of the stiffener, which is then held securely in place and is also able to handle tensional loads due to the fully closed state of each sleeve around one or components of the truss at or near the chords thereof.
Since various modifications can be made in my invention as herein above described, and many apparently widely different embodiments of same made, it is intended that all matter contained in the accompanying specification shall be interpreted as illustrative only and not in a limiting sense.
This application claims benefit under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) of U.S. Provisional Application No. 62/474,374, filed Mar. 21, 2017, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 62588485 | Nov 2017 | US |
