Study On Hysteretic Behavior Of Beam-to-Column Connections With H-shaped Dampers

Conventional wisdom may suggest that the rigid beam-to-column connection has excellent seismic behavior. But during the Northridge and Kobe Earthquakes, many steel moment resisting frames suffered brittle damage at the beam-to-column connections. So subsequent studies mostly focused on understanding the causes of damage to steel structures, and recommending improvements to these connections became the hot subject for the moment. Two scholars of Turkey proposed a new type of beam-to-column connection which a H-shaped damper is placed in the beam-to-column connection. In this connection system, the damper is attached to the beam by bolting a plate on the damper under the bottom flange of the beam. With the plate attached under the damper and on the gusset plate(lower split-T) of the column, it is very easy to replace the damper after an extensive earthquake. This type of connection has large deformation ability, good performance of energy consumption. The destruction of connection mainly concentrated on the damper under load action,and the connection can be repaired by replaceing the damper. On the basis of the previous research, the hysteretic behavior of the beam-to-column connections were studied in this paper.Firstly, the detail of the new connection was introduced. Then the experiment of the new connection was simulated by ABAQUS. It shows that ABAQUS could excellent simulate the experiment of the new connection by comparing the hysteretic curve, skeleton curve, the greatest bearing capacity and the failure position.Secondly, the hysteretic behavior of connections with three type H shaped dampers were studied based on the finite element analysis software ABAQUS respectively. Also, tht effects of the dampers parameters which included limb height TH, the effective width of the limb b/ B, limb number n and the web thickness t were analysised in this paper. By analyzing the stress nephograms, hysteretic loops, skeleton curves, ductility coefficients, energy dissipative coefficients and curves of stiffness degradation of the connections, the results show that:(1) in the process of addition loads, H-shaped damper occur yield and failure first, while the beam and column remained intact, the columns and beams of steel frames will not be damaged after a heavy earthquake, and the structures might be put into the service again simply by replacing the dampers at the connection sites;(2) the connection with H-shaped damper has a high displacement ductility modulus and dissipative coefficient, it has large deformation ability and capacity, and has good hysteretic performance;(3) the parameters of H-shaped damper have a great impact on the hysteretic performance of connection, and the initial stiffness, yield force, ductility modulus and dissipative coefficient varies significantly;(4) based on the results of the finite element analysis, some suggestions on connection design were suggested.