Abstract
Experimental studies are conducted on four repair/upgrade details which are suggested for welded beam to column moment connections. The simplest of these removes the old (cracked) weld material and replaces it with ductile weld material. Another detail considers the addition of horizontal reinforcing plates (cover plates) to the beam flanges, a third adds vertical triangular (fin) plates to both beam flanges, and the fourth uses a weld overlay to reinforce the existing welds. These details are shown to provide varying degrees of improvement in connection behavior with plastic rotation capacities between 2% and 4% being achieved. The results of these experimental programs of investigation into the cyclic behavior of welded moment connections lead to the following conclusions: the original specimen with welded connections representative of pre-Northridge practice has a very low plastic deformation capacity of approximately 0.5%; all of the repair/upgrade procedures discussed in this chapter improve the original connection performance, however, the amount of improvement is variable; the use of the weld replacement procedure return the specimen to its original strength but with only a small increase in plastic rotation capacity and the use of triangular fins increases both the moment capacity and the plastic deformation capacity that reaches a maximum of 2.6%.
Published Version
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