Effects of various reinforcing intra-module connection details on seismic behavior of corner-supported steel modular buildings

Abstract

The rib stiffeners are usually used to reinforce the intra-module connections in corner-supported modular steel buildings; however, may be conflicted with the internal wall panels. There is a lack of relevant understanding of the effects of reinforcing intra-module connections on the seismic behavior of corner-supported steel modular structures. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of the intra-module connections reinforcing details on the seismic behavior of such modular structures. Such proposed reinforcing measures comply well with the architectural internal finishing demand, including vertical stiffeners or cover plates and an enlarging ceiling beam section. Four full-scale two-story plane frame structures were designed and experimentally examined under lateral cyclic loading to investigate and compare their seismic performance, such as the hysteretic performance, skeleton curves, and strain distribution. The experimental results showed that these reinforcing measures were helpful for the development of plastic deformation of such corner-supported modular structures through effectively moving local buckling away from the beam ends. Moreover, the reinforcing intra-module connection details were able to enhance the force resisting capacity and initial lateral stiffness of the overall structures. Additionally, the nonlinear finite-element (FE) modeling was developed and validated against the corresponding experiment. It showed satisfactory agreement with the failure responses and load–displacement curves. The plastic strains at reinforcing intra-module connection were further analyzed through the validated FE models, and the design suggestions were given accordingly.