Resilient seismic design of steel frames with hysteretic fuses in a code-oriented format

Abstract

Modern earthquake engineering has to evolve toward resilience-based design, where structures are expected to survive major earthquakes with reduced or null damage that could be easily reparable in a reasonable time. With such a design strategy, three important goals are warranted: a) life safety of people, b) preserve of building property within a reasonable investment to repair light damage, and c) minimize economic losses because of building's usage interruption. One way to achieve such goal is by using hysteretic energy dissipation devices as structural fuses. Although any global strategy could be used for the successful resilient design of buildings with structural fuses, the authors have work extensively to define global design parameters in order to introduce resilient-based design in the current force-oriented format of most seismic building codes worldwide. Then, global design parameters obtained from very comprehensive parametric studies for special moment-resisting steel frames with hysteretic fuses are presented and discussed. Also, it is shown that the proposed code-oriented methodology is successful to achieve resilient seismic design when subjected to strong earthquake records that may even surpass those considered in their design spectra.