Stiffness Of Panel Zones And Effects On Story Drift Of Steel Frames

Many structures damaged and collapsed in Northridge Earthquake in 1994 and Kobe Earthquake in one year later. Through investigation and study found that most of them collapsed because of brittle failure in rigid nodes which connects beams and columns. This completely changed people’s impression what the rigid nodes had excellent strength and ductility. Engineers and academia have to try increasing the ductility of panel zone, to improve the capacity of seismic energy dissipation. But with the increasing of ductility of panel zone, shear deformation of the panel zone increases as well. Its effect on story drift should not be negligible, and have an important impact on structure performance.There have been many researches of beam-column Panel Zone shear deformation at home and abroad, the elastic deformation research and calculation of the node panel zone are more mature, have a unified calculation method. But the panel zone in plastic deformation condition is relatively complex; there have been rare public opinion of the agreement for the calculation of plastic shear deformation of the panel zone. Many researchers put forward different methods and the models of panel zone.According to various circumstances above, this paper focused on shear deformation calculation of panel zone. Based on the studies of the panel zone deformation calculation formula before, the research considers joint structure forms, frame spans, cross numbers, height between floors, thicknesses of panel zones and strong coefficient of Beam-column. First through the theoretical analysis, discusses the simplified method of panel zone shear deformation calculation, then based on experiment and finite element simulation respectively, according to the results of the analysis above improve the calculation method of professor Guo, and puts forward a new formula with higher accuracy and wider scope, designing five group including 15 specimens for finite element validation with ANSYS.At present, the standard already has a certain calculation method for panel zone elastic shear deformation, but the complete elastic and plastic deformation calculation method of panel zone does not common, this paper has certain theory and engineering significance to the research on stiffness and the deformation of panel zone.