European design recommendations for simple joints in steel structures

In the last twenty years, numerous researches have been devoted throughout Europe to the behaviour of semi-rigid and partial-strength joints in steel structures. These efforts progressively led to the publication of normative documents, design recommendation and guidelines and to the development of various design tools for practitioners. On the contrary rather little attention has been paid to the design of simple joints. In this paper, design recommendations for such joints are presented. They result from deep comparative studies of existing national codes and extensive discussions within the Technical Committee 10 “Connections” of the European Convention for constructional Steelwork (ECCS). The publication of this material as “European recommendations for the design of simple joints in steel structures” should be achieved in 2008.