Design of beams using Eurocode 2

• Main Author: Lee, Jin Hern
• Other Authors: Chuang Poon Hwei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Civil engineering::Structures and design
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/64455
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

As Singapore transitions from using the British Standards to the Eurocode as the standard for the industry, it is important to understand the impacts brought about by the difference of the two design code. Furthermore, as British Standards are no longer being updated, it is prudent to also make comparisons to design codes that are still in active use and are being maintained. In this project, Eurocode 2 (BS EN 1992-1-1:2004) was evaluated against British Standard (BS 8110-1:1997), American Concrete Institute Standards (ACI 318-11) and experimental results regarding the moment capacity of reinforced concrete beams. All evaluations were done using calculated values from each engineering design code and past experimental values. An excel sheet was created to calculate the design moment capacity of each reinforced concrete beam used in the experiments. The the actual moment capacity was divided by the design moment capacity to obtain the moment ratio which was used to determine the accuracy and conservativeness of Eurocode compared to that of the British Standards and American Concrete Institute Standards. Initial statistical analysis of the moment ratio suggested that all three codes are unreliable with close to 30% of the beams having moment ratios > 1 which indicates that the design moment capacity is greater than the actual moment capacity. However after further analysis, this is deemed to be due to the inaccuracies in predicting moment capacity of compression-controlled beams. Based on the calculations, it is concluded that all three design codes perform very similarly with the American Concrete Institute Standards predicting slightly more conservative design moment capacities while predictions from Eurocode and British Standards are virtually identical. This is supported by a qualitative analysis of the three design codes that shows all three codes have remarkably similar methods of calculating the design moment capacity of a reinforced concrete beam. As such, with respect to design moment capacity, impacts from the transition from the British Standards to the Eurocode is likely to be minimal. There is also no significant difference between Eurocode and the American Concrete Institute Standards in value of the predicted moment capacity.