Seismic Behavior Of Moment Resisting Connection With Side Plate

Numerous steel moment-resisting connections failed by brittle fracture during the1994Northridge earthquake and the1995Hyogoken-Nan-bu Earthquake. After the events, peopleraise higher standard of the reliability of beam-column connection. The appearance of sideplate moment connection is a big breakthrough of the design and construction ofbeam-column connection. Side plate connection uses a pair of parallel full-depth side plates toconnect the beam to the column. The beam never touches the column. The physical separationbetween beam and column changes force-transferring path and eliminates the peaked triaxialstress concentration. The connection which makes the actual location of the plastic hinge shiftto beam can eliminate inherent defect of the traditional steel moment connection.Low-cycle loading tests conducted on side plate moment connection were presented inthis paper, including the test phenomena and failure mechanism, the hysteretic performanceand ultimate bearing capacity. The results show that the connections have a good capacity ofenergy dissipation and cause the ductile behavior of structure with formation of plastic hingesin the beams. Finite element analysis software ANSYS was adopted to establish models of thetests and the results are almost identical to the tests. ANSYS was also adopted to analyzeeffects of beams and columns sizes, side plate thickness, side plate length, cover platethickness and column-beam gap. The results show that initial stiffness, yielding load andultimate load increase obviously with the increase of the size of beam. The size of column hasremarkable influence on ductility and energy-dissipating capacity. Seismic behavior isimproved with the increase of either length or thickness of side plate. Both the thickness ofside plate and the size of column-beam gap have negligible effect on the behavior of theconnection. The formula of yield load is obtained using least square method according to theresults of parameter analysis. Seismic behavior comparison between side plate momentconnection and all-welled steel moment connection reveals side plate moment connection isbetter and has broad application prospects.