Automated planar truss design with reclaimed partially disassembled steel truss components

A promising solution to decarbonize steel construction is reusing steel structural components from existing disassembled structures as it avoids sourcing raw material and the heating associated with recycling, as well as reducing the amount of waste from construction and demolition. However, barriers associated with increasing the use of reused steel components in modern construction include concerns about an increased length of the demolition process and the dramatic changes it requires in the structural design task. To simultaneously alleviate these concerns, this work presents a new stock-constrained design and optimization framework for designing planar truss structures from a stock library of partially disassembled trusses. In contrast to existing design methods that rely on reuse at the element level, this work mitigates the demolition process requirements by avoiding the complete disassembly of all structural members. The new automated design framework eases the design process and aggregates partially disassembled triangular components while introducing new material members where necessary to ensure that the new design matches the exterior geometric requirements. The proposed approach is fast (on the order of 0.1 s to generate a trial truss), and a GA optimization module is added to select among generated trial designs. Three case studies with realistic stock libraries demonstrate the potential of partially disassembling and reusing truss components and illustrate how the user-defined design shape and the stock variability influence the resulting design.