Radio Towers

L. R. Creasy, joint author of the paper to be presented on 14 October, gained early sxperience with contractors in both steel and reinforced concrete construction and on war service with the Royal Engineers. He is now Director Civil Engineering a the Ministry of Public Building and Works. The overall expenditure for which he is responsible is about £120 million per annum. The radio towers in London and Birmingham, the tallest buildings in the country, form part of the current programme.

The classical plate theory equations are solved numerically for the case of a load distributed over a small area of an infinite circular slab on an elastic foundation. The results are compared with Westergaard’s solution and a simple design chart presented. W.E. Scriven and W.R. Pilgrim

Theoretical and empirical approaches to the problem of combined bending and torsion have been proposed by various investigators, notably Lessigl,2,3, Chinenkov4, Yudin5, Gesund6,7. Although a full understanding of the mechanism of failure does not exist, considerable advances have been made in recent years. The most elaborate approach which correlates theory with the mechanism of failure was by Lessig and the present investigation was carried out to study the behaviour and the mechanism of failure of hollow reinforced concrete beams under combined loading. A simplified theoretical approach has been evolved which predicts the strength of reinforced concrete beams fairly accurately. Professor R.H. Evans and S. Sarkar