Proceedings of the

International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS)

Symposium 2015, Amsterdam
Future Visions
17 - 20 August 2015, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Problems of operation and maintenance of stadiums

structures
Pavel Georgievich Yeremeyev, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor (Central R&D
Institute of Building Structures named after V.A. Kucherenko), Moscow, Russia,
eremeevpg@ramdler.ru

Abstract
Operation and maintenance of a facility means a scope of activities ensuring safety of its
structures during the designed service life of the facility in accordance with
requirements of regulations and design documents. Operation and maintenance of
bearing structures shall include works on controlling their technical condition,
supporting their performance capability and proper functioning, and preparing to
seasonal operation and maintenance. In the process of design, one shall take into
account quickly growing operational requirements to stadiums. The period of moral
deterioration of a sports facility may be limited to 30 years. It is necessary to provide for
possible upgrade of the facility without its considerable reconstruction, in particular,
replacement of the equipment, taking into account possible increase of loads in the
process of long operation, reconstruction, or upgrade of the facility. The operation and
maintenance mode of a sports facility shall correspond to its intended purpose, design
characteristics and actual technical condition. The main demand placed to sports
facilities is safety of spectators, contestants, personnel and executives, mass media
persons, etc. Safety shall mean protection of the facility and the spectators from
different external threats. These threats may result from crimes, accidents, or human
mistakes, such as erroneous calculations in the process of design, operation and
maintenance, or management of the facility.
Design and erection of facilities requires a comprehensive approach towards choosing
optimal structural solutions and materials, production and installation methods,
operating conditions, and strict control at all stages of the construction process.
Violation of one or several conditions mentioned above will deteriorate the system
safety and cause accidents (failures). An accident shall mean destruction, damage of the
whole facility, its part or certain structural element, as well as their exceedance of
maximum permissible deformations. According to the data provided by different
authors, we discovered the main causes of failures in construction, which may obviously
apply to sports facilities as well. They are: design errors – 20 ÷ 55%, violation of
manufacturing and installation technology – 17.5 ÷ 53%, wrong operation and
maintenance – 5% ÷ 33%, low quality of materials – 6 ÷ 14.5%, incomplete regulations
– up to 4%, other causes and their combinations – up to 25%. The difference in the
aforesaid values of the causes of failures may be obviously explained by lack of the
statistical data, different methods and imperfection of evaluation of the accidents
causes, etc. However, a big share of errors in design, construction and operation is
disturbing. Analysis of the causes of destruction shows that in most cases catastrophic
situations result from the totality of several errors.
 Proceedings of the
International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS)
Symposium 2015, Amsterdam
Future Visions
17 - 20 August 2015, Amsterdam, The Netherlands