Experimental Study on the Effect of Heel Plate Length on the Structural Integrity of Cold-formed Steel Roof Trusses

Applications of Cold-Formed Steel (CFS) are widely used in buildings, machinery and etc. Many researchers began the research of CFS as a roof truss system. It is required to increase the knowledge of the configurations of CFS roof trusses due to the uncertainty of the structural failures regarding the materials and rigidity of joints. The objective of this research is to investigate the effect of heel plate length to the ultimate load capacity of CFS roof truss system. Three different lengths of heel plate specimens were fabricated and subjected to concentrated loads until failure. The highest ultimate capacity for the experiment was 30 kN. The results showed that the increment of the length of the heel plate had slightly increased the ultimate capacity and strain. The increment of the length of the heel plate had increased the deflection of the bottom chords but decreased the deflection of the top chords. Local buckling of top chords adjacent to the heel plate was the primary failure mode for all the heel plate specimens