SYNOPSIS

Fasteners have played a very important role in today’s construction industry, connecting building components together. Safety-critical fasteners to concrete are widely used in construction from small retro-fit applications, to large infrastructure projects.  To compromise their function endangers life and leads to considerable financial consequences, including disruption to the structure. The contributing factors to failures are largely avoidable through an awareness of the factors that impact fasteners’ performance. The absence of guidance in Australian design standards and codes of practice and the lack of training and supervision during fastener installation dramatically increases the risk of failures occurring. Manufacturers, suppliers, design engineers, installers and field engineers may all be implicated in a failure investigation where ignorance is not a valid defence. The Australian Engineered Fasteners and Anchors Council (AEFAC) was founded to address shortcomings in the industry and has developed technical guidance for specification, and an installer certification program to lift quality and safety standards in the industry.

The presentation will discuss new developments undertaken by AEFAC to increase safety in design and installation of fasteners to concrete. Also this presentation will introduce the development of a range of connections to hollow sections using blind bolts. The use of hollow section columns in the construction industry has been traditionally hampered by lack of access for a fully bolted site connection. However this may be overcome using a blind bolting system. Innovative blind bolted connections which require minimal fabrication and can be classified as rigid connections have been developed. Further, design guidelines for these connections have been established and fully validated using full scale tests and detailed non-linear FE analyses. The proposed connections are the first in the Australian market providing an efficient alternative for rigid beam-to-hollow section column connections in low rise structures.


BIODATA OF SPEAKER

Dr. Jessey Lee, MIE Aust. graduated with a BEng (Hons) (First Class) from the University of Melbourne in 2004, and completed her PhD at the same University in 2011. Her PhD research was funded through an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant, which involved researchers from three Universities and two industry partners, Ajax Engineered Fasteners and Australian Tube Mills. She was also the recipient of the prestigious IStructE Best Research Candidature Prize in 2011, and the NAWIC Bovis Lend Lease Postgraduate Scholarship (for valuable research towards the advancement of the construction industry) in 2008. Dr. Lee is currently the Training and Development Manager at the Australian Engineered Fasteners and Anchors Council (AEFAC) and a Research Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. She was practising as a Senior Structural Engineer at Unitised Building Consulting and Robertbird Group, in Melbourne previously, specialising in design of modular structures made from cold formed steel sections. The modular units were fabricated in Australia fully fitted with finishes and façade.