Suitability Analysis On Application Of Steel Residential Building System In China

Since the last 1990's, the steel output in China raised quickly, which has provided sufficient raw materials for the structural steel. A new style of residential construction system, steel residential buildings, obtained more and more attention in research and application. Nowadays, this structural system has entered into a full development stage. On the one hand, local building industry participates more and more actively in the study and project practice, and some construction experiences and research achievements have been gained step by step; On the other hand, a lot of questions which are necessary to be solved urgently have been discovered.The technical, economic and environmental performances of steel residential buildings are studied with analogy and classification method; then a general appraise is presented, which offers theoretic evidences and practical references.Major works and research achievements in this paper are summarized as follows:(1) Based on analysis of research achievements at home and aboard, applicable ranges of different steel residential building systems and their advantages are summarized according to technical study, and key issues of their development are discussed deeply.(2) With practical project investigations, construction costs between steel residential buildings and traditional residential buildings are compared, and main factors influencing the final cost are found. Then, the multiple economic performance of steel residential buildings is analyzed. It is shown that this structure style can provide integrative and long-term benefits, such as lighter weight, shorter construction time and larger usable area. Further, environmental performance, such as resource saving; environment protection, health and comfort to the occupants is discussed.(3) With some practical data used in the appraise, the advantages and disadvantages between steel residential buildings and traditional residential buildings are tried to present in this paper. Finally, some of the development directions are also summarized on the basis of the appraise result.