High strength steels in steel construction

The new European unified technical design rules for steel structures in Eurocode 3 are applicable to steels S235 to S460. It is intended to extend these rules in a second step to steels S690 and other high strength steels to benefit from the weight saving and reduced fabrication costs of using thin plates. In this contribution some problems in preparing design rules for high strength steels are presented and solutions are given for steels S460 and also for S690 for some applications. These solutions are mainly based on the results of large scale tests for which the Eurocodes provide a standardised evaluation method to achieve sufficient reliability. (AU)