Dimension stone design – partial safety factors: a reliability based approach

Abstract

Today's thin stone veneers must be designed to resist, besides their self-weight, high wind pressures and induced seismic forces. They must accommodate hygrometric differential movement, deflection, vibration and creep, etc. When available, code requirements do not provide an accurate or realistic safety factor for the specific type of anchor and or stone used in a project. Global safety factors that are recommended by stone industry associations are imprecise and used as rules of thumb. Limit state design has replaced the older concept of allowable stress design in most forms of civil engineering. As a result, all modern buildings are designed in accordance with a code which is based on limit state theory for all man-made materials, yet there is an astonishing nonexistence of ′natural stone′. In this paper partial factors of safety are proposed depending on the types and on the coefficients of variation of the distributions of resistances. Their values are determined using structural reliability analysis for the load and resistance factor design format according to Eurocode 1990. Aging and stone resistance decay is outside the scope of the article, yet some guidance is provided on the influence of stone durability on stone cladding performance. An application example is used to illustrate both methods, and conclusions are drawn.