During the course of several air-raids on Birmingham in 1940, the greater part of Messrs. Fletcher Hardware, Ltd., warehouse was destroyed by fire. Many gutted buildings collapsed, but a four-storey reinforced concrete building remained standing, although it had been also swept by fire from end to end. Many longitudinal cracks appeared in the concrete, and permanent deformation occurred in some floor panels. After superficial repairs in 1942, the floors were tested and passed as serviceable. By 1950, much of the repair work proved ineffective, and the corrosion of the reinforcement behind the spalling concrete required urgent attention. Stephen Revesz
For the computation of stresses in box-shaped tanks, methods of different kinds exist. The so-called rigid methods take into account as many factors as possible, thus arriving at fairly correct results, but they involve laborious mathematics. On the other hand, the usual approximate methods give rise to simple formulas but, owing to the simplifications necessarily assumed in such methods, they cannot claim to take full account of the elastic behaviour of the structure. In the following method a middle course is adopted. Professor Dr. Ing. Hermann Craemer
The PRESIDENT, expressing the thanks of the Institution to Mr. Capper for his review of the present position of soil mechanics in relation to structural engineering, said all would endorse his statement that close cooperation between practising engineers and research workers was necessary to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
The PRESIDENT proposed a vote of thanks to Dr. Thomas for having discussed and illustrated his interesting and very valuable work, and declared the meeting open for discussion.