Center director attends European Consortium of Constructional Steel Task Committee
Amr Elnashai attended the third meeting of Task
Committee 13 of the European Consortium of Constructional Steel (ECCS)
meeting at Imperial College, London, on 30 May 2009. He presented the MAE
Center work on full scale testing of semi-rigid steel frames, undertaken by
the Center researcher Hussam Mahmoud and David Bennier, with the cooperation
of IT Thrust Leader Bill Spencer. The meeting was chaired by Raffaele
Landolfo, from the University of Naples, and included a number of
researchers from leading universities in Europe. The focus of the Task
Committee is improvements of the European seismic code Eurocode 8. At the
end of the meeting, Federico Mazzolani, also from Naples, and past chairman
of TC13, presented damage and observations from the recent L'Aquilla
earthquake in Italy. One of his main conclusions was that the vertical
component of earthquake ground motion, a major thrust of the MAE Center
work, was influential in perpetuating the observed damage.
