Fiber-based approach for seismic analysis of steel members using finite particle method

Abstract

This paper presents an enhanced fiber-based approach for the seismic analyses of the behavior of steel structural members. This approach is built based on the framework of the finite particle method. Specifically, a fiber-beam element is developed to model the behaviors of structural members more elaborately. A cyclic constitutive model for fiber is proposed by enhancing a uniaxial steel hysteretic constitutive relationship to consider large strain amplitude and low cyclic fatigue. In addition, a fiber-based fracture model is proposed for modeling the progressive failure process of members. The proposed enhanced approach combines the finite particle method and fiber-beam element with more elaborated constitutive and fracture models, and it has the advantages in evaluating the cross-sectional plastic development and dealing with non-linear and non-continuum problems, which is suitable for analyzing the cyclic fatigue, buckling, and fracture of steel structural members. The analyses of steel plates and steel tube member specimens are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The proposed method is applied to analyze the collapse of a Kiwitt-8 single-layer latticed dome subjected to different seismic loads, which shows the feasibility of the fiber-based approach for seismic collapse analysis.