Eurocode 5 Part 2

[Pang Murdock]

TheEurocodes are the ten European standards (EN; harmonised technical rules) specifying how structural design should be conducted within the European Union (EU). These were developed by the European Committee for Standardization upon the request of the European Commission.[1]

By March 2010, the Eurocodes are mandatory for the specification of European public works and are intended to become the de facto standard for the private sector. The Eurocodes therefore replace the existing national building codes published by national standard bodies (e.g. BS 5950), although many countries had a period of co-existence.[3] Additionally, each country is expected to issue a National Annex to the Eurocodes which will need referencing for a particular country (e.g. The UK National Annex). At present, take-up of Eurocodes is slow on private sector projects and existing national codes are still widely used by engineers.

In 1975, the Commission of the European Community (presently the European Commission), decided on an action programme in the field of construction, based on article 95 of the Treaty. The objective of the programme was to eliminate technical obstacles to trade and the harmonisation of technical specifications. Within this action programme, the Commission took the initiative to establish a set of harmonised technical rules for the design of construction works which, in a first would serve as an alternative to the national rules in force in the member states of the European Union (EU) and, ultimately, would replace them. For fifteen years, the Commission, with the help of a steering committee with representatives of the member states, conducted the development of the Eurocodes programme, which led to the first generation of European codes in the 1980s.

In 1989, the Commission and the member states of the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) decided, on the basis of an agreement between the Commission and to transfer the preparation and the publication of the Eurocodes to the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) through a series of mandates, in order to provide them with a future status of European Standard (EN). This links de facto the Eurocodes with the provisions of all the Council's Directives and/or Commission's Decisions dealing with European standards (e.g. Regulation (EU) No. 305/2011 on the marketing of construction products and Directive 2014/24/EU on government procurement in the European Union).

All of the EN Eurocodes relating to materials have a Part 1-1 which covers the design of buildings and other civil engineering structures and a Part 1-2 for fire design. The codes for concrete, steel, composite steel and concrete, and timber structures and earthquake resistance have a Part 2 covering design of bridges. These Parts 2 should be used in combination with the appropriate general Parts (Parts 1).

All of the EN Eurocodes relating to materials have a Part 1-1 which covers the design of buildings and other civil engineering structures and a Part 1-2 for fire design. The standards for concrete, steel, composite steel and concrete, and timber structures and earthquake resistance have a Part 2 covering design of bridges. The Part 2 should be used in combination with the appropriate general Parts (Parts 1).

The Eurocodes suite is made up by 10 European Standards for structural design. Each Eurocode consists of a number of parts that cover particular technical aspects. The links between the Eurocodes are given in the figure.

It is a rather simple steel frame that serves two functions. It is used for assembling a series/stack of ventilation devices (filters, heat exchanger etc) onto it, and then, once assembled and transported to customer, it is also used for lifting it into place. It is the lifting that is the critical load case that need to be analyzed.

Setting up the model with constraints, material properties, loads etc is pretty easy. I can run it, and I can extract results, such as stress, strain. I can, if necessary, refine the model and solution, to get a more accurate result etc. It has a few bolt connections that can be modeled in more or less detail.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to relate these results; i.e. stresses, strains, displacements, to the Eurocode 3 standard. This is not straight forward. I called a guy at the Swedish Institute for Standards, who are responsible for issuing these standards in Sweden. He could not give me a straight answer. "It sorta depends"...

The standard describes how to introduce so-called partial factors, i.e. safety factors to account for uncertainties regarding loads, geometry, material properties etc. Also this is pretty straight forward. So given that I know these partial factors, I can run my analysis and calculate, say a maximum stress level. How do I then use this stress (or strain or deformation) to determine wether or not my design fulfils the standard. I.e. what is actually the dimensioning criteria that should be satisfied. The standard says, as far as I can see, that the "design value of effect of actions should be less thatn the design value of the resistance"

i don't think you can use a FEA analysis for eurocode due to stress concentrations (artificial in the fem software). EC3 basically gives you the allowable stress (sigma zulssig) for the given usage conditions/ loads.

I can use different techniques to refine the FEA model so that it correctly calculates stresses in critical regions. That's just a matter of how detailed/complex I want to make the model. So the stress level from the FEA is correct. It is how to compare this stress and deformation result with Eurocode 3 that is not clear. There are a few paragraph's in Appendix C of "EN 1993-1-5: General rules - Plated structural elements" that mention how to use FEA for Eurocode, but how to establish a dimensioning criteria is not explicitly described.

Eurocode 1, Actions on structures, contains within its 10 parts (see table below) all the information required by the designer to assess the individual actions on a structure. It is generally self-explanatory and the actions to be used in the UK (as advised in the UK NAs) are typically the same as those in the old British Standards (BS 6399: Loading for buildings and BS 648: Schedule of weights of building materials). The most notable exception is the bulk density of reinforced concrete, which was increased to 25 kN/m3.

The Concrete Centre provides material, design and construction guidance. Our aim is to enable all those involved in the design, use and performance of concrete and masonry to realise the potential of these materials.

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The Eurocodes are a set of structural design standards, developed by CEN (European Committee for Standardisation), to cover the design of all types of structures in steel, concrete, timber, masonry and aluminium. In the UK, they are published by BSI under the designations BS EN 1990 to BS EN 1999; each of these ten Eurocodes is published in several Parts and each Part is accompanied by a National Annex that implements the CEN document and adds certain UK-specific provisions.

This article introduces the Eurocode system, sets out the format that is used and explains the relationship between the Eurocodes, their National Annexes and non-contradictory complementary information (NCCI). It explains that the basis of structural design is set out in BS EN 1990[2] and that this defines the common principles and specifies how design values are to be determined and verified. A brief summary of the various actions (loading) that are defined in EN 1991 is given.

The article introduces the parts of EN 1993 (Eurocode 3) that are required when designing a steel framed building and briefly introduces EN 1994 (Eurocode 4), for composite steel and concrete structures, and EN 1992 (Eurocode 2), which covers the design of the concrete elements in composite structures.

The Governments of the UK and its devolved regions publish documents which provide guidance on the means by which compliance with the Building Regulations in force in that region can be achieved. For structure safety these are: Approved Document A[3] (England); Approved Document A[4] (Wales); Scottish Technical Handbook [5] and Technical Booklet D[6] in Northern Ireland. It should be noted that the English and Welsh Approved Documents have been separate only since 2013. Differences between them are small but one should be aware that they exist. When this article, or any other article on this site, refers to Approved Document A, by default it will be the English version[3].

Approved Document A[3] to the Building Regulations (England) currently references the Eurocodes. It states that: British Standards for structural design based on the Eurocodes were.....implemented by the British Standards Institution on 1st April 2010 and it is these standards with their corresponding UK National Annexes which are now referenced in this Approved Document as practical guidance on meeting Part A requirements.

It further states that: There may be alternative ways of achieving compliance with the requirements and there may be cases where it can be demonstrated that the use of withdrawn standards no longer maintained by the British Standards Institution continues to meet Part A requirements.

It is important to recognise that the regulatory system in the UK is such that the Building Regulations themselves merely make high level demands, for example that a structure is safe. Use of the standards cited in Approved Document A[3] is only one way to demonstrate that requirement has been met.

Each Eurocode comprises a number of 'Parts', which are published as separate documents. Each Part consists of a main body of text, normative annexes, and informative annexes (the 'relevance' of which is decided on a national basis).

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