Zoltan Kiss

A long span structure in Romania

The authors will describe in the following pages the reasons why the project of the Multi-functional Sports Hall from Cluj Napoca is attractive. The main lines of the building are: a hall with a capacity of 7000 seats, a structure dominated by precast concrete elements, a long span roof and an advanced analyze of the connections, all well-kept into the limited funds. The roof solution consists in using steel space trusses made out of square hollow sections (SHS). The truss has a clear span of 63.90m, a total length of 76,10m, a maximum height of 4,00m that is reduced on the length of the structural element, and a triangular cross section being 3,60m wide. Global stability checks and specific local stability problems were performed and are exposed in the following paper. For the fabrication of the space truss, welded joints between the SHS profiles were designed. As a result of the fact that for characteristic failure checks of the welded TT and KK joints analytical methods are based only on a semi-empirical formulae, developed for Φ=90 degrees (the angle between the diagonal planes), for the design of joints finite element modelling was used. Good agreement between the results of the developed finite element joint model and the analytical method for TT and KK joints has been found, even though the semi-empirical formulae are applied for the analysed truss which had Φ=50 degrees.