Characterising the Seismic Behaviour of Steel Beam-Column Joints for Seismic Design

The seismic behaviour of beam-column joints can strongly affect the performance of steel frame buildings, as was witnessed from the 1994 Northridge earthquake in the United States. In Europe, a range of beam-column joint typologies are permitted but seismic design guidelines that account for different joint typologies in steel frames are relatively limited. Considering the above remarks, the European Research Fund for Coal and Steel has provided financial support for the DiSTEEL project, which aims to deliver a set of practical performance-based design guidelines for steel MRF structures. The objective of this report is to characterise the seismic behaviour of beam-column joints employed in MRF structures and provide simplified design tools to permit the seismic design of the various connection types.

This report first collects a total of 76 sets of experimental data on both fully welded and extended end-plate connections available in the literature for the calibration of numerical models. Using these, a series of parametric studies are conducted, which results in a series of simplified design tools being proposed. Among these are simplified expressions to determine connection yield drift, plastic resistance and plastic rotation capacities of partial strength and flexible connections. In addition, a set of displacement-reduction factors have been proposed that will prove useful for displacement-based design of MRFs.

Overall, this report provides a valuable contribution to the state-of-the-art as it moves towards providing simplified tools and guidelines for the performance-based design and analysis of various beam-column connection types employed in steel MRFs