Pedro Casariego, assistant director of Academic Affairs and Teaching Staff for the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture, was recently nominated for the Bernt Johansson Outstanding Paper Award by the Committee assembled for the 2019 Nordic Steel Construction Conference, which is due to take place in Copenhagen (Denmark) from 18-20 September. His submission will vie for the award with 8 other studies by authors from different countries.

The Conference Committee also asked Pedro Casariego to extend his research for publication in Steel Construction, a 2nd-quartile journal listed in SJR, which was recently released in paper format.

The paper, entitled "Compression behaviour of cold formed steel trapezoidal sheeting with transverse corrugations", analyses press-formed structural arches made from corrugated, cold formed steel sheeting. These arches are made by press-forming thin sheets of steel (between 0.6 and 1.2 mm thick) and can cover spans of up to 9 metres. 

They are highly efficient, as, once manufactured in the factory, the arches can be transported to the work site and fitted directly atop the main roof beams, eliminating the need for joists and reducing both material and labour costs. The arches are self-supporting, easy to install and highly economical.

“The problem with these arches is that the press-forming process, necessary to fold the sheeting, changes the material’s original properties, making it impossible to know how the curved profile will behave and how strong it is”, explains the lecturer. The paper uses the finite element method to analyse the behaviour of the corrugated profile when subjected to pure compression.