The Transition From National Standards to European Standards for Structural Steels

Recommended foundation depths in shrinkable clays On 18 January, Mr G. A. H. Trollope expressed the opinion that the minimum foundation depths in shrinkable clays on sites without trees, as recommended by the Building Research Establishment, were inadequate in that it was not reasonable to ignore the long-term likelihood of trouble from trees introduced within the presumed lifetime of the building concerned. Richard Driscoll (of the Geotechnics Division at BRE) considers the extent to which it would be feasible to adopt recommendations that would satisfy Mr Trollope’s criteria: Mr Trollope expresses concern about BRE continuing to find 0.9m-deep foundations for lowrise buildings acceptable on clay sites without trees. He suggests that trees are normally planted after site development and, therefore, that foundations should be designed to take account of ‘very likely future events’ and, in particular, of clay subsidence. Verulam

It is commonly assumed that lateral torsional buckling about the minor axis does not occur, and this assumption is adopted by BS 5950. This paper demonstrates that this is not in general true for thin-walled channel sections. It has been shown that Young's equation for the buckling of imperfect columns could be applied separately to the rotation and translation of torsionally buckling struts to describe correctly the stress distribution in the strut and hence to find the axial force that causes yield; failure follows shortly thereafter. In this paper the same method is applied to find the lateral torsional buckling resistance of members subject to uniform bending. D. Buhagiar, J.C. Chapman and Professor P.J. Dowling

MS M. J. McDowell My question relates to the design of the arch. Did the designers consider the effects of uneven imposed loading on the floors causing an unbalanced load in the arch? If so, on what did they base their assumptions?