LNEC Specifications

The drafting of technical specifications is a natural consequence of research and technological development activity; in fact, it is through the drafting of technical specifications that a research organisation transfers the relevant knowledge acquired in the course of its research to the technical environment.

As a research and technological development organization in the field of civil engineering and construction, LNEC has been publishing technical specifications for construction products and processes for almost 60 years, through the well-known editorial series specifications LNEC: effectively, the first LNEC specifications, called Vocabulary of Roads and Aerodromes, was published in 1951, anticipating by three years the publication of the first Portuguese standard.

Currently, nearing the edition of half a thousand specifications LNEC, it is noticeable that this standardization activity of LNEC has, over almost seven decades, provided a relevant service to national technical standardization, since about half of the specifications gave rise to Portuguese standards, by adaptation or simple text transposition.

With Portugal's entry into the European Union in January 1986, national standardization became closely related to European standardization published by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) insofar as the harmonization of technical specifications is one of the requirements for guaranteeing the free movement of products in the European Economic Area; consequently, in the last two decades, the national technical normative collection has grown essentially by adopting as Portuguese standards the published European standards.

Thus, in the national interest, LNEC's contribution to national normative activity has become primarily directed towards monitoring the development of European standards, with the CEN standardization technical committees, and not so much towards drafting national technical specifications, namely Portuguese standards. Furthermore, many specifications LNEC were removed from the catalogue due to the publication of a European standard covering identical subject matter, in whole or in part.

However, the edition of specifications LNEC, although with a less vigorous flow than in the past, is justified and will continue to be justified by the need to disseminate to the national technical community of civil engineering and the construction industry the relevant knowledge acquired in research activity related to both the specification of appropriate characteristics and performance levels of construction products, and their respective test methods, and the specification of good practice rules to be used in the realization of construction processes.

Given the above, the collection of specifications LNEC in force still consists of about one hundred and fifty documents distributed across the areas of Materials, Buildings, Transport, Structures, and Geotechnics in Civil Engineering.

If you would like more information about these documents, please send an email to: lnec@lnec.pt.