Case Studies and Practical Examples Related to 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 for facade access equipment are contained within 29 CFR 1910 and 29 CFR 1926, the structural requirements are interspersed with thousands of other requirements that are unrelated to structural engineering. For engineers tasked with designing or evaluating facade access equipment, the structural provisions are often less than clear due to OSHA's use of terminology that is not common in the structural engineering profession. For this reason, the Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI) sponsored the development of the Guideline and Commentary for the Structural Design, Evaluation, and Testing of Permanent Building-Supported Facade Access Equipment to help engineers understand the structural engineering provisions related to the design and evaluation of facade access equipment. This paper, along with three other companion papers, including "Introduction to the Guideline and Commentary for the Structural Design, Evaluation, and Testing of Permanent Building-Supported Facade Access Equipment" (Lewis et al., 2014), "Structural Design Recommendations for Building-Supported Facade Access Equipment" (Searer et al., 2014), and "Evaluation and Testing of Building-Supported Facade Access Equipment" (Hill et al., 2014), are intended to introduce the new AEI guideline and OSHA's structural requirements for permanent building-supported facade access equipment. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate practical examples of how these requirements can be applied to actual equipment on actual buildings.