Engineers Ireland

Professor David A Nethercot is Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College as well as being Deputy Principal of the Engineering Faculty.  He has more than thirty years experience of research, specialised advisory work and committee activity in the area of steel, aluminium and composite construction.

 

A particular interest in his research has been the influence of connection behaviour on the overall performance of frame structures, where he has been responsible for major programmes of combined experimental and numerical work that underpin design treatments in British, European and other national standards, as well as industry design guides such as those produced by the SCI. Current research interests include progressive collapse of structures and light gauge and stainless steel construction.

 

David was, for more than 10 years, chairman of the BSI Committee responsible for BS5950 and for UK input into EC3, he is a Past President of the IStructE, Past Chairman of IABSE's technical committee responsible for oversight of all the Association's technical activities and a Past Deputy Chairman of the Council of the Steel Construction Institute.

 

The collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York provided television viewers worldwide with a firsthand view of the structural phenomenon known as progressive collapse.  Although this phenomenon is not new (for example, the Ronan Point apartment building in London collapsed some 40 years previously), the dramatic impact raised questions within the structural engineering community about exactly how the collapse happened, what was the governing mechanism, and how greater robustness might be provided to potentially vulnerable structures.  The result has been heightened interest at the fundamental level, considerable research, and the prospect of more realistic representations of the key features of the phenomenon in design procedures.

 

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