Design of Braced and Unbraced Cantilevered Steel False Work

The architectural design of buildings with nontypical floors can create risky situations in which cantilevered slabs and beams are extended while the floor beneath has no cantilevered slabs on which the false work can rest. The design proposed in this paper is based on using steel cantilevered false work to support the formwork system, with no need for extending the false work along the height of the building. A closed-(form solution for the temporary structure was formulated and validated using a commercial software program. A parametric study was performed using the closed-(form solution to study the variations of the straining actions within the members with the changes in dimensions. The study was extended to design for the lightest member configuration of the false work for each cantilevered span. The design was extended to include the addition of a diagonal bracing member. The variations between the two designs were included in the study. (C) 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.