Anyone who is responsible for building a house etc has to comply with standards - this applies to civil engineers as well as individual home builders. The standards are set out in a European set of rules, the Eurocodes. As construction practice has advanced noticeably in recent years and new technologies have been developed, the standards no longer reflect the current state of the art in all areas. The regulations have therefore undergone a thorough revision. Eurocode 7 (EN 1997) is decisive for the design of geotechnical structures. To make it easier to apply in practice, it is accompanied by four supplementary publications. A was produced with the collaboration of TUBAF researcher Dr Julia Sorgatz.
It took five years to write the accompanying publications, "an intensive collaboration at European level," explains Julia Sorgatz, a geotechnical engineer at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. "Our document >>Determination of representative values from derived values for verification with limit states with EN 1997<< supports planners in deriving geotechnical parameters reliably and in accordance with standards from measurement data - even under challenging conditions such as a limited number of samples or depth-dependent properties." The new EU standard is initially "a set of rules without much explanation", she says. As co-author, she has written one of four guidelines that can be understood as a practice-orientated commentary on the regulations. The text is a supplementary documentation of the content and provides application examples.
For example, anyone building in Hamburg will find that the ground is very soft and piles have to be embedded in the ground. Elsewhere, the classic shallow foundation is sufficient to ensure the stability of a building. When dimensioning these geotechnical structures, i.e. the mathematical proof that a structure is sufficiently safe, information on the strength of the soil is required. "Previously, this was done using characteristic values, which were primarily determined on the basis of empirical values. This approach is now being supplemented by statistical methods," says Julia Sorgatz. Even if familiar statistical methods are used, the new terminology and the division into different use cases make additional explanations beyond the standard text necessary. "Our guideline shows that the research at the Institute of Geotechnical Engineering at TUBAF is scientifically relevant, contributes to the further development of standardisation and thus helps to shape geotechnical practice in Germany in the long term," Julia Sorgatz explaines.