1 What’s in This Book?
Our book is about the use of aluminum as a material of construction for
structural components.
Our major themes are:
• The suitability of aluminum as a structural material,
• How to design aluminum structural components in accordance with the
Aluminum Association’s Specification for Aluminum Structures,
• How to apply the design methods to actual structures.
We begin by introducing you to aluminum, and we hope that by the end
of Part I you are sufficiently well acquainted to be ready to get serious about
the relationship. In Part II we explain the design requirements of the 2000
edition of the Specification for Aluminum Structures (hereafter called the Aluminum
Specification), published by the Aluminum Association in its Aluminum
Design Manual (4). Those of you who can’t wait to plug and chug may
want to jump right ahead to Part III, and refer back to Part II only when you
want to know ‘‘Where did that come from?’’
We assume that you have already had ample exposure to methods of load
determination and structural analysis, so we do not replow that ground. We
do, however, include in Part II a discussion on local buckling since this is a
limit state (i.e., failure mode to you old-timers) that you may have been
sheltered from if your design experience has been primarily with hot-rolled
steel.
As we discussed in the Preface, we have keyed the discussion of design
requirements to the Aluminum Specification. In Part II we compare these
design provisions to the more familiar requirements for steel buildings published
by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) in the Specification
for Structural Steel Buildings (hereafter called the Steel Specification)
(38, 39). The Aluminum Specification is primarily intended for building structures;
thus, we focus on these applications.
Throughout the book we give attention to those features of aluminum that
differentiate it from other structural materials, particularly steel. Perhaps the
most significant feature that distinguishes aluminum from steel is its extrudability.
Extruding is the process of forming a product by pushing it through
an opening called a die. The cross section of the resulting product is determined
by the shape of the die. You may simply prepare a drawing of the