Issue 3

David Lazenby (Vice-president) and Dr. John Dougill (Director of Engineering) visited Brussels in early October. The main purpose of their visit was to obtain an on-the-spot view of progress in the preparation of Eurocodes and their supporting standards, as well as to update our contacts in the European Commission and in the UK Representative’s Office. J.W. Dougill and D.W. Lazenby

Advanced or high performance composites are materials in which high strength and high modulus fibres are used in relatively high volume fractions and fibre orientation is controlled to enable high stresses to be carried predictably and safely, without the need for large factors to allow for uncertainty. Typical examples are plastics reinforced with either glass, aramid or carbon fibres. P.R. Head

The Eurocode for Actions (Eurocode A) is in preparation. It is concerned with the loads and other actions, e.g. prescribed deformations, to be considered in the design of buildings and civil engineering structures. It is one of the ‘structural’ Eurocodes, i.e. it is a companion Eurocode to the ‘design’ Eurocodes, e.g. Eurocode 2: ‘Design of concrete structures’, which present common rules for the design of structures. J.B. Menzies

Following the demise of MEMCON, I wrote to the then President, Peter Campbell, expressing my reasons for non-attendance and also extrapolating into further areas of the Institution’s life. Via the pages of Structural news, the retiring President challenged me to write a ‘Viewpoint’ article along the same lines. This, by its very nature, is a personal viewpoint, and I share in Peter Campbell’s wish that it may lead to further debate. P. Nuttall

The structural behaviour of reinforced concrete coupled shear wall structures is greatly influenced by the behaviour of their coupling beams. Flexural and shear (diagonal splitting) are the two main modes of failure of reinforced concrete coupling beams. The behaviour of coupling beams in shear (diagonal splitting) mode of failure is represented by a mathematical model, and a method for the ultimate strength analysis is presented. The proposed method of analysis for rc coupling beams is used to verify the results of nine beams tested by a previous investigator. N.K. Subedi

Stressed brickwork exhibits a visco-elastic behaviour. A number of rheological models have been used in the past to explain this behaviour, notably the Maxwell, Kelvin and Burger models. In this paper, the author proposes a 'modified' Maxwell model to explain the behaviour of brickwork under a sustained load. Using this model, a number of practical problems can be solved such as change of stress with time in reinforced, post-tensioned and composite brickwork construction. The paper also explains the process of stress relaxation in confined brickwork. The problems are illustrated with examples. D. Lenczner