Since the 1950s/1960s, the education and training of civil/structural (c/s) engineers has undergone dramatic changes. It has been largely an evolutionary process, mostly in the best possible way, but reactive rather than proactive with the attention and quality of training varying from one office to another. Professor Ramnath Swamy
It is now 7 years since the conference on ‘Innovation and change in civil engineering education’ took place at Queen’s University, Belfast. Pressures already apparent at that time have intensified, but it is not so easy to see how teaching has adapted to those pressures, or to see what the impact of the 1993 conference has been, in practice. Howard Allen
The application of semi-rigid flush endplate connections to the seismic design of steel frames is investigated experimentally. Two test series are described in which specific connection details are varied and the effects on stiffhess, resistance and ductility observed. Cyclic loading conditions representative of earthquake structural response are employed in each test. The observed plastic response mode, resistance and stiffness are compared with those predicted by Eurocode 3. While specimen stiffness did not vary greatly between tests, large differences in ductility were observed. Although intended for monotonic loading conditons, the provisions of the design Code proved adequate in determining whether a ductile or brittle failure would occur, but seriously underpredicted the ultimate resistance of the specimens. Such conservatism, which was most evident in the more ductile specimens, has implications for earthquake-resistant column design in which an upper bound on connection strength is required. A.W. Thompson and B.M. Broderick
The response of 70 sleeved concrete cylinders, impacted axially using a drop weight accelerated by gravity, is described. The contact force, skin stresses and deformational response of the impacted sleeved cylinders were all measured during the impact event. The concrete cylinders, 200mm high and approximately lOOmm in diameter, were of design strength 40N/mm². They were confined by thin walled, hollow tubes of steel (of varying thicknesses), aluminium or plastic. A group of unconfined concrete cylinders was also impacted, forming a reference series. This paper explains the rationale for the tests and gives details of the experimental work and test results. S.J. Prichard and Professor S.H. Perry
Codes on Trial Several members have addressed different aspects of a variety of Codes, some of them British Standards and others the draft of new Eurocodes.