Research on Design Reference Period and Structural Design Method

Abstract

In structure design, for expressions with partial safety factors, partial safety factors and nominal value of loads are calculated based on the presupposition that the design reference period is 50 years. When the design reference period is not 50 years, it would cause unclear reliability of building structure by using expressions with partial safety factors following correlative codes yet. It may lead to hidden dangers in that way. In order to derive expressions with partial safety factors suitable for any design reference period, two useful methods are shown in this paper, modification of partial safety factors and modification of importance factor of structures. From results of analysis, we get the conclusions that it can assure the reliability index of the expression using the method of modification of partial safety factors, and the method of modification of importance factor of structures is very simple, but cannot assure the reliability index of the expression.