Metal Building Vehicular-Access Door

Wind Analysis and Design

Paul S. Mueller1 and Cristopher D. Moen A.M.ASCE2

Abstract: An analysis-based vehicular-access door design protocol for pre-engineering metal buildings is introduced. Existing access door
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curtain and jamb design approaches are viable for rigid door jambs. However, it was shown with experiments that wind-lock forces decrease
and door out-of-plane deflection increases when the door jamb and framing are more flexible (e.g., in the case of typical cold-formed steel-
framing details in which a C-section jamb is discretely braced by wall girts). A beam strip model based on an Euler–Bernoulli elastica solution
is implemented in a freely available wind-analysis computer program that considers jamb and framing flexibility. This tool is integrated with
an access door design protocol that provides designers both door serviceability and jamb strength limit-state checks that are explained with
step-by-step videos and spreadsheets. Maximum and minimum values for the wind-lock spacing, wind-lock gap, and door curtain moment of
inertia are provided for various door spans to accommodate situations in which the door jamb and framing design must be completed before
the door type is selected. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)SC.1943-5576.0000267. © 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
Author keywords: Cold-formed steel; Deflection; Stiffness; Vehicular-access door system; Hurricane wind pressures; Design guide.

Introduction
Annual wind damage costs in the United States are estimated to be $5
billion (Pielke and Landsea 1998), and pre-engineered metal buildings
have proven especially susceptible, as documented in posthurricane
surveys, for example, after hurricanes Ike (RICOWI 2009) and
Katrina (RICOWI 2007) in the United States and after Tropical
Cyclones Larry (Cyclone Testing Station 2006), George (Cyclone
Testing Station 2007), and Yasi (Cyclone Testing Station 2011) in
Australia. In these surveys, a critical weakness in metal building exte-
riors was the vehicular-access door (Westerfield 2006; Walker and
Stark 2010). It was common to see doors fail at the door jamb from ei-
ther unhinging or excessive jamb deformation (Fig. 1). When the
doors failed, interior wind pressures caused catastrophic façade fail-
ure, and the buildings and their contents were a total loss [Fig. 1(a)].
On the basis of these findings, the Metal Building Manufacturers
Association (MBMA) invested in a multiyear study to improve access
door design, the results of which are summarized in this paper.
The focus of this study is rolling-sheet doors (such as that shown
in Fig. 2). These doors are made up of a thin, continuous corru-
gated-steel curtain. The curtain is typically fitted with wind locks
riveted to the vertical door edges at regular intervals (300–600
mm). The door slides up and down unimpeded in service along a
wind bar attached to the door jamb (Fig. 2, Section A-A) and locks
in place when wind pressure is applied to the door curtain. If the
door deflects too much, the wind lock may slip off the wind bar, and
the door curtain may be deformed plastically, which might prevent
1
Graduate Research Assistant, Dept. of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ., Blacksburg,
VA 24061 (corresponding author). E-mail: paulm17@vt.edu
2
Associate Professor, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ., Blacksburg, VA 24061.
E-mail: cmoen@vt.edu
Note. This manuscript was submitted on January 28, 2015; approved
on May 29, 2015; published online on January 22, 2016. Discussion period
open until June 22, 2016; separate discussions must be submitted for indi-
vidual papers. This paper is part of the Practice Periodical on Structural
Design and Construction, © ASCE, ISSN 1084-0680.
it from rolling up after a storm. The door jamb can fail if the wind-
lock forces, developed by catenary action across the door, exceed
the jamb’s structural capacity or the jamb-to-wall framing connec-
tion strength. Accurate door out-of-plane deflection and wind-lock
force predictions are both vitally important when designing a metal
building for extreme wind pressures.
Current design practice places responsibility for door perform-
ance on the door manufacturer (DASMA 2011). Each door type and
span are tested according to a standard procedure [i.e., ANSI-
DASMA 108-2002 (ANSI 2002), written by the Door and Access
Systems Manufacturers Association (DASMA)]. The door is in-
stalled in a test chamber where a uniform static air pressure differ-
ence is applied to simulate wind pressures during an extreme wind
event. The wind locks are typically fixed directly to a rigid jamb—
hot-rolled hollow structural section (HSS) or masonry wall—that
form part of the test chamber. Air pressure is applied in the chamber
on the basis of the design wind speed, and the out-of-plane door
deflection is measured. To pass the test, the door must stay within the
allowable deflection limit at maximum pressure, and the residual
deflection, after unloading, should be 25% of the maximum deflec-
tion to ensure that the door can be rolled up after returning to service.
Wind-lock forces and door deflections can be predicted with cat-
enary cable calculations [e.g., with the DASMA calculation method
(Gao and Moen 2009, Appendix D) or a similar approach used in
Australia (Haddad and Woolcock 2012)]. The calculations solve for
catenary forces under the assumption that the door jambs carrying
the wind forces from the door into the building are rigid, which
implies that the steel door out-of-plane displacement increases until
the wind-lock gap closes (see Fig. 2, Section A-A). Once the wind
locks engage, it is assumed that there is no additional out-of-plane
deflection and that additional wind pressure is transferred to the
jamb as a cable in tension. However, these assumptions were found
to be inconsistent with rolling-sheet door experiments in which typ-
ical U.S. cold-formed steel C-section jambs were used; in those
experiments, jamb flexibility increased door out-of-plane deflection
and decreased wind-lock forces (Gao and Moen 2009, 2012).
This paper presents a comprehensive vehicular-access door
design protocol that considers the door, the door jamb, and building
framing together as a system. The importance of collaboration

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Fig. 1. (a) Rolling-sheet door failure north of Biloxi, MS, after Hurricane Katrina; (b) door wind locks remained in place, but the door jamb failed

HORIZONTAL HEADROOM 3.66 m MAX WALL BARREL ASSEMBLY

22.2 cm. OPENING WIDTH 22.2 cm.
14.9 cm. (CLEAR OPENING)
VERTICAL EXISTING STEEL
HEADROOM JAMB 0.476 cm. MIN
10.8 cm.
THICKNESS
(1.75 cm.)
BRACKET
HEAD STOP
WIND BAR
SELF-DRILLING
GUIDE SCREW 1/4 - 14 X 2.54 cm.
6.10 m MAX STEEL @ 30.5 cm. O.C. MAX
WALL JAMBS
OPENING 2.08
A A cm. CURTAIN
HEIGHT GUIDE
(CLEAR OPENING) CONCRETE/ 0.953 cm. WIND-LOCKS ATTACH
26 GA FILLED BLOCK WITH 2 EACH 0.476 cm.
CURTAIN JAMBS RIVETS-ZINC COATED
WIND-LOCK @ EVERY
OTHER
CORRUGATION

SECTION A-A

SIDE VIEW INSIDE ELEVATION BOTTOM BAR ASSEMBLY

Fig. 2. Rolling-sheet door with wind locks and a wind bar (Janus Series 3100 12
20 T1004C)

between the building’s owner, engineer, and door manufacturer is
discussed and treated in the design protocol. Rolling-sheet door
behavior is explored in the next section with a review of recent
experiments, followed by the introduction of a wind-analysis com-
puter tool that is integrated with an access door system design pro-
cedure. The work herein focuses on rolling-sheet doors; however,
the analysis and design protocols presented could also be applied to
slat doors with future experimental validation.
Rolling-Sheet Door and Door Jamb Behavior
Wind-lock forces on a rolling-sheet door had not been measured
until an experimental program was designed to quantify these
forces when the door is exposed to design-level wind pressures. A
3,050-
3,050-mm access door with wind locks was tested in both
negative pressure (pulling the door out of the building) and positive
pressure (pushing the door into the building) with a custom vacuum
chamber, as documented by Gao and Moen (2009). The door had
18 wind locks along each vertical edge [Fig. 3(a)], and the door
jambs were cold-formed steel C-sections braced by Z-section girts
[Fig. 3(b and c)] that were bolted to connection plates welded to the
jamb web [Fig. 3(d)], which is consistent with typical metal build-
ing detailing in the United States.
Under pressure, the doors exhibited a bilinear pressure–displace-
ment relationship (Fig. 4). In the first low-pressure region, the wind
locks were free to displace and were not restrained by the wind bar.
As the pressure increased, the out-of-plane curtain deformation
increased until the wind locks fully engaged the wind bar. The door
jamb restraint limited further in-plane curtain deformation, which
led to an increase in stiffness, denoted by the sharp change in slope
in Fig. 4.
Each wind lock was instrumented with strain gauges, and the
strains were recorded as pressure was applied to the door. The
maximum measured forces in the wind locks calculated from
the strains (Gao and Moen 2009) were approximately 50% lower
than that predicted by the DASMA procedure that uses catenary
equations and assumes rigid door jambs (at a pressure of 2.87 kPa,
2.18 kN per wind lock in the experiments versus 5.56 kN per wind
lock predicted by the DASMA procedure, as shown in Fig. 5). The
measured out-of-plane door deflections were more than double
those of the DASMA predictions [at 2.87 kPa, 305 mm in the Gao
and Moen (2009) experiments versus 135 mm predicted by the
DASMA procedure).
The difference between the measured and predicted behavior
was attributed to cold-formed steel C-section jamb deflection (Fig.
6), which caused additional in-plane movement of the door after the
wind locks engaged. A small in-plane movement resulted in a large

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Fig. 3. Rolling-sheet door experiment setup (reprinted from Gao and Moen 2009, with permission): (a) door with wind locks instrumented on the
right vertical edge; (b) cold-formed steel C-section door jambs braced by Z-girts; (c) cold-formed steel jamb welded to vacuum chamber floor; (d)
bolted plate connection between the Z-girt and the C-section jamb

2.5
Simulated wind pressure (kPa)

2 Experiment (loading)

DASMA
prediction

1.5

wind lock
engagement
Experiment (unloading)
0.5

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Out−of−plane door deflection (mm)

Fig. 4. Rolling-sheet door out-of-plane bilinear pressure–deformation response

out-of-plane deformation. Therefore, as the C-section jamb de-
flected from the applied wind-lock forces, curtain deflection was
amplified. The additional door deflection reduced the in-plane com-
ponent of the catenary force transferred to the door jamb.
It was concluded from this experimental program that wind-lock
forces and door deflection are sensitive to jamb stiffness, and this
stiffness should be included in the design approach for vehicular-
access doors. The DASMA design procedure is viable when the
door jambs are rigid; however, it underestimates door deflection
and overestimates catenary forces for access doors with flexible
door jambs. A new method for evaluating vehicular-access door
forces and deflections with flexible door jambs, including a freely
available software tool, is introduced in the next section.
Rolling-Sheet Door Wind Analysis
The access door experiments demonstrated that away from the top
and bottom of the door curtain, deflections caused by wind pressure
result in primarily one-way deformation across the span of the door.

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 3.0

2.5

DASMA
prediction

2.0
Location from the top (m)
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1.5

1.0

0.5

0.0
-1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 5.5 6.0
Maximum force (kN)

Fig. 5. Experimental wind-lock catenary forces are lower than the DASMA-calculated forces for a rolling-sheet door with flexible door jambs
(reprinted from Gao and Moen 2009, with permission)

Fig. 6. Vehicular-access door behavior is influenced by (reprinted from Gao and Moen 2009, with permission): (a) jamb cross-section bending and
twist; (b) the door system with wind locks can be idealized as a spring-beam model; (c) high wind-lock forces cause C-section door jamb plastic
deformation

If one-way action is assumed, catenary force and deflection predic-
tions for a vehicular-access door can be simplified to an inextensible
beam strip model similar to that shown in Fig. 6(b). This assumption
is consistent with the existing DASMA prediction approach, except
translational springs were added to the beam ends to simulate door
jamb flexibility.
A nonlinear system of ordinary differential equations that
describe elastic beam strip behavior was derived (Janas and Moen
2011) on the basis of a beam elastica solution using Euler–
Bernoulli beam theory, which accounts for large flexural defor-
mations (Timoshenko and Gere 1961). The equations are solved
for curtain displacement and internal forces with a freely

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 available Windows-based computer program (CBSA) written in
MATLAB 7.14.0.739. The program inputs are the door span (S),
the wind-lock gap (WS), wind-lock spacing (WT), the door elastic
modulus (E), the door cross-section moment of inertia per wind
lock (I), the jamb stiffness (kjamb), and the wind pressure range.
There is an option to reduce the door curtain moment of inertia
(Iloss) to account for curtain flattening at high wind pressures
(Janas and Moen 2011, Section 4.6). The program outputs jamb
reactions per wind lock (Fx, Fy) the midspan out-of-plane door
deflection (D), the catenary force per wind lock (C), and the cur-
tain rotation (slope) at the wind lock (u ).
Vehicular-access door jamb details vary widely from manufac-
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kb, and jamb torsional stiffness, kt, both of which can be determined
with tests or calculations considering the jamb boundary conditions
along the door height. These two effects are combined as springs in
series, with kjamb = (1/kb + 1/kt)−1. For rigid jambs, such as a ma-
sonry wall, the kjam value approaches infinity, and for a HSS, kjamb =
kt. The wind-analysis program and jamb-stiffness procedures were
validated in a later experimental program (Gao and Moen 2012) for
both flexible and stiff cold-formed steel jambs. This wind-analysis
protocol is integrated with a comprehensive access door design
approach in the next section.

turer to manufacturer and from building to building and with the
door span. The wind bar may be fastened to a hot-rolled steel jamb,
a cold-formed steel C-section, or a masonry wall. Detailed proce-
dures for calculating jamb stiffness (i.e., kjamb) were developed for
C-section cold-formed steel jambs by Janas and Moen (2011). The
jamb stiffness is a function of jamb web-flange bending stiffness,
Vehicular-Access Door Design Protocol
It is clear from the experimental programs that vehicular-access
door performance during extreme wind events depends on both
the door details and the door jamb stiffness and strength. This
interdependency is complicated by the fact that the building

Fig. 7. Vehicular-access door design flowchart

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Pract. Period. Struct. Des. Constr., 2016, 21(2): 04016001

 owner typically selects a door brand and type after the building is
designed, leaving the metal building engineer to make assump-
tions when designing the jambs. The door manufacturer certifies
the door for a certain wind pressure while assuming rigid jambs;
however, the actual door’s behavior may be quite different in
service.
A design protocol to improve and clarify vehicular-access door
design is proposed in Fig. 7. The design works as follows. The
door type, door size, and jamb are selected, after which a wind
analysis is performed to confirm that the out-of-plane door deflec-
tion (D) does not exceed a serviceability limit that can be obtained
from the door manufacturer or taken as S/12 on the basis of obser-
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vations in the Gao and Moen (2009) experiments. If the deflection
limit is not satisfied, the jamb size and details are modified, and
the wind analysis is performed again. Once the serviceability limit
state is satisfied, the catenary wind-lock forces Fx and Fy, obtained
from the wind analysis in CBSA or with the DASMA procedure
for rigid jambs, can be compared with the calculated jamb and
jamb-to-framing connection capacities.
It is common for the engineer to know only the door span but
not the specific door details (e.g., curtain moment of inertia and
wind-lock gap, both important parameters that influence door
deflection and catenary wind-lock forces). In these cases, rolling-
sheet access door manufacturers have provided a range of param-
eters based on a DASMA survey that can be used in the design.
For door spans (S) between 2,440 and 6,100 mm, the wind-lock
gap (WT) ranges from 10 mm (minimum) to 28 mm (maximum),
the wind-lock spacing (WS) ranges from 102 to 305 mm, and the
curtain moment of inertia per 30.5 cm of curtain height (I) ranges
from 0.624 to 0.708 cm4. How these ranges are used is left to the
engineer’s discretion—selecting the most conservative parameter
combination and taking the average of the parameter limits are
both viable approaches. Sensitivity to each parameter can be
explored with CBSA.
Working through a full access door design can be complicated.
To assist designers, roll-up access door spreadsheets were created
for a “flexible” C-section jamb and a “rigid” steel HSS jamb,
including step-by-step videos. The spreadsheets and videos lead a
designer through wind analysis, jamb-stiffness calculations, jamb
flexure, torsion-capacity checks, and jamb connection strength. The
tutorials are available for download from the Virginia Tech digital
repository (VTechWorks 2014).
Conclusion
A multiyear research program to study rolling-sheet vehicular-
access door behavior during an extreme wind event was completed
recently. The work resulted in a new design protocol for the metal
building industry and door manufacturers. Existing door curtain
and jamb design approaches are viable for rigid door jambs (e.g.,
the wind bar attached directly to a masonry wall); however, for flex-
ible jambs (e.g., a cold-formed steel-framing system), the wind-
lock forces and the door deflections should be calculated consider-
ing jamb and framing stiffness. A beam strip model based on an
Euler–Bernoulli elastica solution is implemented in a freely avail-
able computer program that assumes one-way curtain action to cal-
culate these deflections and forces. The project culminated in an
access door analysis-based design approach coupled with a wind-
analysis computer tool and spreadsheet tutorials that treat both door
serviceability and jamb strength limit states.
© ASCE 04016001-6
Pract. Period. Struct. Des. Constr., 2016, 21(2): 04016001
Acknowledgments
The authors are appreciative of the support they received
throughout this project from the MBMA, especially the thought-
ful advice from the steering group. Mr. Jerry Hatch of NCI
Building Systems, Inc., provided valuable guidance throughout
the test program. Coordination with the sponsor was provided by
Dr. Lee Shoemaker and Mr. Dan Walker of the MBMA. Mr. Joe
Hetzel of the DASMA provided important input regarding access
door design procedures and details. Dr. Raymond Plaut, Professor
Emeritus in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department
at Virginia Tech, assisted in the elastica beam equation derivations
used to predict access door behavior.
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Pract. Period. Struct. Des. Constr.