Abstract
Long-span spatial structures are typical city landmarks. Earthquakes can cause serious damage to these structures, leading to tremendous human injury and financial loss. Therefore, it is essential to develop effective devices to enhance the performance of spatial structures. This article proposes a new triple-tube glass fiber–reinforced polymer and steel buckling-restrained brace device for reticulated shells, which integrates the light weight and high strength advantages of the composite materials. Specimens of scaled glass fiber–reinforced polymer and steel buckling-restrained braces were designed and produced, and pseudo-static tests were performed on these specimens with an MTS machine. Mechanical performance and damages were examined and compared. An elaborate finite-element model was setup, and the accuracy of this model was verified with the test data. In addition, the model was used to investigate the effect of the Pe/ Py ratio on the performance of full-scale triple-tube glass fiber–reinforced polymer and steel buckling-restrained brace devices. Finally, the lower limit of the Pe/ Py ratio for this kind of buckling-restrained brace was obtained by theoretical derivation and numerical parametric analysis.
Highlights
Long-span spatial structures commonly provide emergency shelters within a city
Based on surveys of historic damages from earthquakes, spatial structures perform much better than most other kinds of buildings because they are usually designed as light steel structures
Two spatial structures were seriously damaged in the Lushan Ms7.0 Earthquake that occurred in China on 20 April 2013
Summary
Long-span spatial structures commonly provide emergency shelters within a city. Based on surveys of historic damages from earthquakes, spatial structures perform much better than most other kinds of buildings because they are usually designed as light steel structures. They continually optimized the distribution patterns of BRBs on reticulated domes and presented effective damping modes.[15,16] Both seismic isolations and damping devices are capable of reducing dynamic impacts on common structures. The discount value of 0.85 caused by initial imperfections and the enhanced value of 1.3 on the yield stress of steel were considered; Using this lower limit value of the Pe/Py ratio, tripletube GFRP-steel BRB components were designed as test specimens for this study. A series of pseudo-static tests were conducted on the triple-tube GFRP-steel BRB specimens with a 250 ton MTS Electro-hydraulic Servo Testing Machine (as shown in Figure 5) to obtain the failure modes, energy-consumption capability, and ultimate capacity of each specimen.
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