As an extension to the Australian Journal of Structural Engineering paper that was reported in last month’s HERA News, the paper entitled ‘Australasian Advances in Steel & Composite Structures to Enhance Cross-Border Practice’ was delivered by Prof. Brian Uy (CIES Director and Chair of IABSE-Australia) at the 17th Association of Structural Engineers of the Philippines International Convention ( 17AIC ).
Co-authored by Dr Stephen Hicks, and Dr Won Hee Kang from the Institute for Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Western Sydney, the paper provides a pathway for structural steel products to be sourced from many international sources and used in design. As well as the existing steel products included in NZS 3404, the paper also considers steel produced to the following manufacturing standard GB/T 11263.
From structural reliability analyses, the paper demonstrates that the capacity (safety) factors used in design are insensitive to the different cross-sectional tolerances given in the respective product standards. However, the most significant effect on the capacity factors is the magnitude of the coefficient of variation of the yield stress fy (= standard deviation / mean value), which needs to be obtained from the particular steel mill.
To assist designers, a family of design curves are presented within the paper for beams with different section classifications and different coefficients of variation of the yield stress. Copies of the paper are available to members from our library.
