Circular hollow sections (CHS) represent several advantages, such as uniform behaviour in all directions, possibility to obtain composite behaviour by concrete infill, hence high strength, stability and good fire resistance. Moreover, their aesthetic appeal has a great potential for the decision maker's attention, be that the architect or the building owner. However, they are not widely adopted in practice due to the complexity and high cost of their joint details. EU-RFCS project LASTEICON (Laser Technology for Innovative Connections in Steel Construction), started on July 2016 [1] proposes simpler joint solutions with reduced fabrication costs, to be adopted between CHS columns and I beams, making use of laser cutting technology (LCT). The primary objective of the LASTEICON project is to overcome the complexity of steel joints between CHS columns and I beams, and let engineers and architects exploit the outstanding structural properties of hollow section profiles. Laser cutting will allow the reduction of the shop fabrication time, obtaining higher precision high quality joint fabrication, and improving workplace safety reducing the amount of manual labor while increasing computer-programmed automation. This paper presents the preliminary results obtained in the Work-Package 1 of the LASTEICON project (www.lasteicon.eu), which consisted in a study of tolerance optimization for an efficient fabrication of I-beam-to-CHS column joints.
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