SDSS 2025

Reliability assessment of a warehouse built from reclaimed steel members

  • Arrayago, Itsaso (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC))
  • Rega, Claudia (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC))
  • Real, Esther (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC))
  • Mirambell, Enrique (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC))

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The European construction sector plays a major role in the transition towards the sustainable development due to the high levels of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions associated to this economic sector, in which embodied GHG represent between 10-20% to the total EU’s building GHG footprint. In this context, reclaiming and reusing structural steel components for the new construction of buildings is considered a key strategy towards guaranteeing a sustainable development, as it will allow to increase the high-life cycle performance and to reduce life-cycle costs. However, one of the main drawbacks for making the reuse of steel components a reality is the current lack of rigorous regulatory frameworks that provide designers with the necessary certification of the quality of the reclaimed elements and ensure the suitable performance of the final constructed structures throughout their service life. With the objective of contributing to the development of this standardization framework, this paper presents the reliability assessment of a steel warehouse built from reclaimed steel members. The warehouse is one of the five demonstrators built within the DRASTIC EU project, which has the objective of “Demonstrating real and affordable sustainable building solutions with top-level whole life cycle performance and improved circularity”. Based on a rigorous structural reliability framework, this research first analyses the variability expected in the resistance of the steel warehouse under different load cases (including permanent loads, imposed loading and snow) using advanced finite element analysis and distributions of the main input variables adjusted to reclaimed steel members. Subsequently, the system-based reliability assessment of the demonstrator is carried out using First Order Reliability Methods, and the levels of reliability achieved for different values of partial resistance safety factors are compared with the target values required by the Eurocode.