A NEW APPROACH TO PLASTIC DESIGN AND OPTIMIZATION OF PARALELL CHORD VIERENDEEL GIRDERS

This study was prompted by the need to elaborate on recent developments in plastic design of, parallel chord Vierendeel girders (VG). The paper proposes exact, general solutions to two novel classes of VG under practical loading conditions, a-VG of uniform section, where the chords and the verticals may be composed of two different prismatic sections, and b-VG of uniform strength, where the constituent elements are selected in such a way as to induce a state of equal stress for all members of the structure. It has been shown that the total weight of both classes of VG can be minimized by the proper selection of the relative strengths of the members of each system. The essence of the paper is based on a novel failure mechanism presented for the first time in this article. It has been shown that racking moments can be utilized to conduct spot checks on final solutions. Several generic examples have been provided to demonstrate the applications and the validity of the proposed solutions.