Issue 6

Mr. J. C. Knight: I became concerned with the building some ten years ago when the general scheme was reaching an advanced formative stage, and it was necessary to consider the mechanical, electrical and engineering services. Our first task was to analyse the building to see whether there was anything very special in the way of services required. Of course, as Rome has a very hot climate we were concerned primarily with the need for air conditioning. Ten years or so ago air conditioning for an office building was unusual even in Rome and so we paid particular attention to the way in which the interior of this building would be affected by the wide climatic changes which would be experienced.

An earlier paper by Khan and Kemp considered the elastic composite action in a slab-beam system, in which the ends of the beams are resting on rigid columns. In this paper, the elastic composite action study is extended to include the flexural stiffness and the end conditions of the elastic columns. M.A. Khan

January 1971 was the first occasion that the Institution examined candidates for corporate membership in the Part 3 Examination only; and the first time that the Technician Test was set. This review of the performance of both groups of candidates is based upon the reports of the respective examiners, all of whom are practising chartered structural engineers with an average age of well below forty.

The principal theme underlying the paper is the development-from a structural engineering standpoint-of a form of construction for high riseflats, based essentially on ‘factory-made’ components, on the one hand quicker to build than more traditional forms of in situ reinforced concrete construction and, on the other, comparable in terms of cost and also structural behaviour if subjected to an abnormal load.

This paper briefly reviews the subject of wind-induced oscillation of steel and reinforced concrete stacks, and attempts to collate relevant information from various sources in order to illustrate the major problems to be overcome by the practical designer. Useful practical parameters have been extracted from this information for use in the design of circular steel and reinforced concrete stacks. K. Irish and R.G. Cochrane

The paper uses yield-line theory to derive equations and charts suitable for the limit design of uniformly loaded rectangular reinforced concrete slabs with rectangular openings. Four positions of openings are considered: the slab centre, the slab corner, the centre of a short side, and the centre of a long side. The ratios of the corresponding lengths of the sides of the opening and the slab are kept the same and sizes of opening of up fo 0.6 of the length of the slab sides are considered. The edges of the slab are assumed to be either all fixed or all simply supported. Design charts are plotted for various values of the ratio of negative to positive yield moments and for the ratio of the yield moments in the two directions. S. Islam and R. Park Two-way reinforced concrete slabs often contain