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This study presents a systematic approach for the development of an efficient steel beam section for modular construction based on Six-Sigma. Although the Six-Sigma is frequently implemented in manufacturing and other service industries, it is a relatively new concept in the area of building design and construction. As a first step in this approach, market studies and surveys are conducted to obtain the opinions of potential customers. Then the opinions of customers are converted into quality characteristics for the steel beam using the quality function deployment methodology. A steel hollow flanged channel is chosen as the main modular beam shape, and the design concept is derived and developed by applying the Pugh matrix methodology. A pilot test was performed to validate the effectiveness of the developed beam section. The results indicated that the developed channel beam section showed excellent performance and retained high accuracy in fabrication, thus resulting in a significant reduction of steel consumption.

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Due to the lack of design standard and the difficulty of analysis, the floor vibration analysis of lightweight steel floors has received less attention than the analysis of typical floor structures. In this paper, the finite element model for lightweight steel floors is presented utilizing the rigid link and realistic support restraints. The rigid rink is used to solve the problem of difference in the centroid of beam, joist, and flooring material and to guarantee the same behavior of those members. Two different support restraints, all fixed restraint and mixture of fixed and released restraint, are used in the analysis. The finite element model is verified through the human impact loading test of the full-scale lightweight steel floors that have different joist condition and middle beam. The finite element analysis results indicate that the different joists having same moment of inertia yield similar natural frequencies, while the test results of full-scale floors show that the floor with the closed shaped joists yields higher natural frequency than the floor with open shaped joists. The test results also indicate that the finite element analysis using the mixture of fixed and released support restraint yields closer natural frequencies to those of actual floors.

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