Special Issue on Behavior and Design of Steel Weldments

Abstract

This special issue of the ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering is devoted to the subject of using welds to join steel members in frame structures. In particular, the focus of content is on the behavior of welded connections in building structures when subjected to strong ground shaking during severe earthquakes. It was primarily in multistory buildings that welds fractured during the 1994 Northridge, California Earthquake and also subsequently during the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake near the city of Kobe in Japan. Design details differ in significant ways between the steel building systems used typically in Japan and those used typically in the United States. It should be noted that the papers herein cover fundamental topics that are relevant to the experience of both nations, but the details discussed are most apropos to steel building systems used in the Western United States. Here I shall provide a very brief introduction to the problems discovered following the 1994 Northridge earthquake. A common strategy to resist drift in multistory buildings is to incorporate moment-resisting frames in the structural systems of the buildings. As the name implies, a moment-resisting frame is designed to provide continuity of shear force and bending moment through joints where girders and columns intersect. To achieve this desired behavior, steel moment frames require special connections between girder flanges and the columns so that flexural stresses from the girders can be transferred efficiently through the joint. Commonly, the girder-flange-to-column connections are complete joint penetration welds ~Fig. 1!.