Standardization of Safety Assessment Procedures across Brittle to Ductile Failure Modes (SAFEBRICTILE) : final report

The European design rules for steel structures in EN1993 cover various failure modes and were developed using different methodologies with respect to accuracy and safety. Consequently, the safety level of these rules is neither homogeneous throughout their field of application, nor across the various design rules. EN 1990 - Annex D offers a procedure for the reliability assessment of resistance functions. However, its application is not straightforward in many cases concerning steel design rules and several additional assumptions are necessary to ensure that a target probability failure is achieved. Moreover, the design rules are calibrated covering certain variability of the relevant parameters, such as material properties, geometric properties and imperfections. It is, therefore, essential to appropriately characterize the statistical distributions of the basic variables in order to properly apply the safety assessment procedure. The research work, carried out in the context of contract RFSR-CT-2013-00023 SAFEBRICTILE, had as a main objective the harmonization of the reliability level of design rules for steel structures covering modes driven by ductility, stability and fracture. This report gives an overview of the reliability assessment of the Eurocode 3 design rules carried out within the project related to cross-sectional resistance, buckling resistance of columns, beams and beam-columns and weld resistance; it presents the adjustments to these design rules proposed whenever it was necessary; it also establishes recommendations on the statistical distributions of the relevant basic variables for steel structures, compiled in a "European database of steel properties" that was also developed within the project.