Live Load for Office Buildings: Effect of Occupancy and Code Comparison

Abstract

The present paper presents results of a live‐load survey in office buildings. A live‐load model for the calculation of lifetime maximum total load is calibrated by using the Sydney survey data. Loading characteristics for government and nongovernment occupancies are compared. Sustained load for government occupancy is observed to be greater. However, as the frequency of occupancy change is much higher for nongovernment occupancies, their lifetime maximum sustained load for small areas becomes larger. For large and medium areas, government occupancy still has higher loading. Three types of extraordinary load are identified. Parameters for all three types of government occupancy have higher values than nongovernment ones. The maximum mean extraordinary load and also the lifetime maximum total load are substantially larger for government occupancy. The 95% fractile lifetime total load predicted by the model is compared with the Standard Association of Australia (SAA) loading code, American Building Officials and Code Administrators (BOCA) building code, and the U.K. loading code.