Thin-Walled Structures Group

The Thin-Walled Structures Group research concentrates on the behaviour of scaffold and pallet rack structures, where it has been influential in the development of European standards in access scaffolds and pallet rack structures and has developed a state of the art second-order program for the analysis and design of pallet racks according to the FEM code.

The Group works in collaboration with Dr Mike Godley of Slender Structures Limited. The Group currently has six PhD students working in the areas of seismic design of pallet rack structures, the shear stiffness of pallet rack structures in the cross-aisle direction, methods of preventing collapse of pallet rack structures under extreme loads, numerical modeling of the joints of scaffold structures to fully capture the non-linear characteristics of the connections, computational fluid dynamical analyses and wind tunnel modeling of the effects of wind load on scaffold structures and an experimental and computational analysis of the behaviour of cassette roof structures.

Recent papers by Dr Robert Beale illustrate the work of the group. The Group has set up collaborations with the University of Jordan (Dr M.S. Abdel-Jaber) into vibration and rack analyses and with Curtin University, Miri Campus Malaysia (Dr H.H. Lau) into pallet rack structures.

In 2007, the Group organised and ran the 6th International Conference on Steel and Aluminium Structures at St Catherine's College, Oxford, which attracted over 100 delegates. The next ISCAS meeting, ISCAS'11 will be held in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia from 13 to 15 July 2011.