Vandalism loads in Australian codes

[Settingsun]

Are vandalism loads specified in an Australian standard, or other document from a weighty source? I'm referring to miscellaneous items installed in public spaces that you mightn't call 'a structure'.

In absence of anything better, I'd currently go for AS1170.1 roof type R1 for vertical loads, although this doesn't really account for deliberate attempts to damage something; and RMS Bridge Technical Direction 2012/01 for horizontal loads. But I'm after better.

Failing Aus codes, international codes/references appreciated.

 

[rapt]

I don't know of any code that covers vandalism loading.

Talked to the chair of the AS loading committees and he does not either and suggested it is a good time to use engineering judgement for the vandalism situation you are expecting, somewhere between application of a sledge hammer to small thermonuclear device!

 

[Settingsun]

Thanks, Rapt. I thought that would probably be the case and have had no problems with just using judgment in the past. But a colleague has come across one of those jobs where *everything* needs a certificate and I wondered, if I found myself on the same situation, what I'd actually be certifying...

 

[Trenno]

I don't have anything to add except this extract from an IStructE article. Food for thought.

In May 2015 we published an article on assessing the capacity of the historic Grand Parade stone balustrading in Bath, UK. A number of readers have concerns about the validity of the forces used in the assessment. The first contribution is from Ken Wiseman, who writes:
The paper by Collins and Cooke (May 2015, pages 26–31) suggests that an international rugby side scrummaging against a parapet, as shown in their Figure 9, would exert a force of only 1.4kN. That seemed to me to be intuitively wrong. The pack weights of international teams are typically over 800kg (916kg for the England team in the 2015 Six Nations tournament). Can packs of such weight convert only 17% of their body mass into a forward thrust?The 1.4kN figure is apparently taken from a paper by Preatoniet al 1, which appears to be misinterpreted – the forward thrust of international packs indicated in their Table 2 is 16.5kN at peak (approximately 200% of pack weight) and 8.3kN sustained (about 100% of pack weight). The 1.4kN force quoted by Collins and Cook is what Preatoni et al describe as “lateral force” – by which they mean the force exerted by the scrum at 90° to the line of action of the scrum.Collins and Cooke are surely correct to point out that unthinking application of code requirements is not always (if ever) appropriate in structural design, but it is a little worrying to think that design might instead be based on misinterpretation of research which has been undertaken for a completely different purpose. The paper by Dickie and Wanless on “Spectator terrace barriers” 2 is not cited at all by Collins and Cooke, but this paper reports theoretical and experimental research that is more directly applicable to balustrade design.