105
Technical-economic analysis of industrial buildings
Rev. Téc. Ing. Univ. Zulia. Vol. 44, No. 2, May-August, 2021.
Introduction
Industrial buildings are those that allow not only the storage of supplies, but are also used as production
centers, car washes, offices, shopping centers, industries, etc. (Hernández, 2015), which enable the satisfaction of
humans in various spheres of society. An industrial building is a unit for industrial use that houses the production
and/or storage of industrial goods, together with the workers, the machines that generate them, the internal
transportation, the exit and entry of goods, among others (Arnal et al., 2014).
The design of industrial buildings in Ecuador is based on the Ecuadorian Construction Standard (NEC,
2014), which is based on regulations such as: ASCE (2017), AISC (2016) and AISI (2016), which are dedicated to
studying the characteristics and forms of behavior of steel and the development of standards for the structural
calculation that governs steel design, thus developing the limit state method and the load and resistance factor design
(LRFD) (NEC, 2014; AISC, 2016; AISI 2016; ASCE, 2017; Cano y Imanpour, 2020).
In civil engineering, and more specifically in the construction field, it is essential to have a well-structured
budget for the correct implementation of a structure. We know that it is not always possible to have work quantities
without first carrying out a seismic resistant analysis and design of a building, such is the case of industrial buildings
(Guerrero, 2019). Consequently, this research proposed to carry out a structural analysis and design of a group of
industrial buildings that have particular characteristics in terms of length, height and spacing between frames. Based
on this analysis, the weights over m² of each building were obtained as a reference, which in turn were used to apply
a non-linear Lagrange interpolation, which led to the determination of an equation with its respective graphic
representation (abaci). With these results, it was possible to determine in a fairly approximate way the weight per m²
of industrial buildings different from those that were taken at the beginning of the research, so that later, using these
results, we would be able to get the cost of the material for each structure.
Experimental
The main objective of this research was to carry out a technical analysis of a group of industrial buildings,
in order to find the costs of steel material using a non-linear Lagrange interpolation, which is represented through
abaci.
Pre-design of the structural elements of industrial buildings
One of the considerations that were used in this research was a pre-design of the structural elements that
make up industrial buildings, with the aim of starting with data that will be approximate to the expected results in the
behavior of a frame under gravitational stresses, which must meet the resistance requirements. Generally,
reinforcements are placed in the areas with greater stresses to ensure the stability and safety of the structure. (Élez,
2016). In this specific way, the research had the following parameters as its starting point: column free height (H),
clear span of the building (L), modulation between frames (B1 or B2), defined in Table 1 and illustrated in Figure 1.
With this, the geometry of the structure was defined, obtaining 40 combinations of industrial buildings, which were
analyzed and modeled.
Table 1. Variants and combinations of free column height, frame width and length of the industrial building.
Free column height (Hi)
(m)