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Eurocodes: Moving with the times

From March 2010, all public sector works (in Europe) will need to be designed to Eurocodes and British Standards will no longer be updated. There are ten Eurocodes in total – one explaining the basis of design to Eurocodes and the principles behind them, one explaining load cases to be considered, one for each of the major materials – steel, concrete, timber, masonry, aluminium and composite construction – one for seismic design and one for geotechnical design. Each consists of a number of parts and is accompanied by national annexes, which give country specific values and guidelines. All ten Eurocodes have now been published as well as a large majority of the national annexes.

For your info, Eurocodes are a set of codes of practice for designing and buildings and civil engineers structures that are internationally unified.

As Europe moves to replace British Standards with Eurocodes, I believe Malaysia (which relies very much on the British Standards) will soon have to adapt to the new design codes. In my undergraduate years, I still remember the two codes which we used in our structural design works – BS 8110 and BS 5950. BS 8110 is the soul for reinforced concrete design while BS 5950 is for structural steelwork.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad to change, but from what I know the change will be a good one as it is based on the latest science and positive advancement on the methods used. It also moves to narrow the discrepancies in the engineering vocabulary used across the globe. Having said that, lots of effort had been poured in to make this change.

Now that I am doing my masters I already started designing my composite slab according to Eurocodes, I am using Eurocode 4 at the moment. It takes a while to adapt to the changes because I have to relearn what I had learned previously. One thing for sure, the English used in Eurocodes is much easier to comprehend and straight forward. Good job for that!

The ten codes related to structures are as below and they cover every aspects of structures:

• EN 1990 Basis of design
• EN 1991 Eurocode 1: Actions on structures
• EN 1992 Eurocode 2: Design of concrete structures
• EN 1993 Eurocode 3: Design of steel structures
• EN 1994 Eurocode 4: Design of composite steel and concrete structures
• EN 1995 Eurocode 5: Design of timber structures
• EN 1996 Eurocode 6: Design of masonry structures
• EN 1997 Eurocode 7: Geotechnical design
• EN 1998 Eurocode 8: Design of structures for earthquake resistance
• EN 1999 Eurocode 9: Design of aluminium structures

Luckily I am still studying in UTM. This gives me the opportunity to download (for free) all the design codes. It’s good to be a student, ain’t it? We get free stuff most of the time, even if it’s not free we still have the student’s price priviledge.

Image: courtesy of Eurocodes