Seismic behavior of steel beam-column connection with assembled steel rod energy dissipaters

The exorbitant expenses associated with the post-earthquake rehabilitation of the primary structure has been addressing the importance of a resilient building that exhibit easy and cheap repairability. To achieve a resilient building structure, a feasible way is to localize the plastic damages in preselected structural fuses which can be easily replaced. In doing so, a novel energy -dissipative steel beam-column connection incorporating the assembled steel rod energy dissi-paters (ASREDs) was proposed in this paper. Firstly, the moment-resistant capacity and the rotational stiffness was theoretically derived based on a simplified mechanical-based method and the component method, respectively. Then, cyclic tests on four specimens were conducted to investigate the cyclic and recovery performance of the connection. The influences of the quantity, location, and geometrical details of the ASREDs on the performance of the connection were evaluated. The considered connection performance indexes included strength, deformability, and energy dissipation capacity. Test results showed that the proposed connections efficiently pro-tected the primary structural members of the steel frame, i.e., beams and columns, by restricting the plastic damage within the core rod of the ASREDs. The obtained hysteretic loops were stable and plump, whereas the strength degradation was not observed until the rotation of the beam -column connection exceeded 0.03. The damaged connection was easily repaired by replacing failed ASREDs. The repaired connection exhibited identical performance with the original one. Finally, numerical models accounting for the ductile damage of ASREDs were established to reproduce the test results and to enrich the experimental database. Results showed that the nu-merical model could simulate the seismic behavior of connections with reasonable accuracy, and the analytical methods for predicting the performance of the connections were validated against both experimental tests and numerical simulations.