Structural Design Recommendations for Building-Supported Facade Access Equipment

The United States' Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has numerous requirements that govern the design, use, evaluation, and testing of facade access equipment. These requirements are part of the US Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Although the relevant structural requirements are contained within 29 CFR 1910 and 29 CFR 1926, the requirements are interspersed with thousands of other requirements that are not related to structural engineering. The provisions that are related to structural engineering are often less than clear in terms of their intent due to their use of terminology that is not common in the structural engineering profession. For this reason, the Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI) sponsored an effort to develop a guideline to help engineers better understand the structural engineering requirements that govern the design, evaluation, and testing of permanent building-supported facade access equipment. The purpose of this paper is to review OSHA's requirements and explain how they might be converted into easily understood, unfactored design live loads. This paper is associated with three other companion papers regarding facade access systems, including "Introduction to the Guideline for the Structural Design, Evaluation, and Testing of Permanent Building-Supported Facade Access Equipment, and Commentary" (Lewis et al., 2014), "Evaluation and Testing of Building-Supported Facade Access Equipment" (Hill et al., 2014), and "Case Studies and Practical Examples Related to Facade Access Equipment" (Larson et al., 2014).