Abstract
The Japanese Occupational Safety and Health Law was revised in March 2009 to incorporate preventative measures against fall accidents in construction. Along with this revision, a new regulation was enforced to ensure the presence of guardrails, toe boards, mesh sheets, etc. in scaffolds. As many of these devices were incorporated in only one side of the scaffolds, the latter were subjected to an eccentric load. Although the allowable live load and other aspects of scaffolds are regulated by the recommendations for design, the new law renders these recommendations somewhat ineffective because they were framed for conventional scaffolds. In this study, the buckling load of the vertical frame subjected to an eccentric load is examined by both numerical analysis and the equation method. Through a comparison of these two approaches, it is ascertained that the results of the equation method correspond well to those of the numerical analysis. Therefore, the validity of the equation method is confirmed. The buckling load of the vertical frame decreases as the ratio of the eccentric load increases. The results recommend that scaffolds be designed by taking the eccentric load into consideration when the guardrail, etc. is incorporated on only one side of the scaffolds.
