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This series of Designers Guides to the Eurocodes provides comprehensive guidance in the form of design aids, indications for the most convenient design procedures and worked examples. The books also include background information to aid the designer in understanding the reasoning behind and the objectives of the codes. All of the individual guides work in conjunction with the Designers’ Guide to EN1990 Eurocode: Basis of Structural Design.
All aspects of seismic design are covered in Designers’ Guide to EN 1998-1 and 1998-5 Eurocode 8: Design provisions for earthquake resistant structures. General rules, seismic actions and rules for buildings, instead of being distributed across the Eurocodes on actions (EN 1991), design with specificmaterials (EN 1992 – 1996) or geographical design (EN 1997). This was for the convenience of countries with very low seismicity, as theymay not need to apply Eurocode 8 at all.
This present Designers’ Guide covers EN1998-1 (General Rules, seismic actions and rules for buildings) and EN1998-5 (Foundations, retaining structures, geotechnical aspects), both published by CEN at the end of 2004. These two parts of Eurocode 8 will be included, as service items, in all Eurocode packages (each package referring to a specific type of civil engineering structure and construction material) along with EN1990: Basis of Structural Design, EN1997: Geotechnical Design and the relevant parts of EN1991-1: Actions on Structures.
The development of Eurocode 8 as the single seismic design code in Europe has been the focus of the European earthquake engineering community in the past twenty years. Its emergence as the European Standard is important not only for public safety in seismic southern regions of Europe, but also for competitiveness of the entire European consultancy and engineering services sector in seismic regions in Europe and beyond.
