Study on shear failure of joint with external stiffener under seismic loads

Abstract

This paper aimed to investigate the shear failure of joint with external stiffener between square hollow section (SHS) column and H-shaped beam under seismic loads. The quasi-static tests were performed on four specimens. The typical shear failure on panel zones was observed. The hysteretic curves and skeleton curves exhibit the excellent capacity of energy dissipation and ductility of this type joint. The ductility coefficient and energy dissipation coefficient were adopted to quantitatively analyze the effects on ductility and energy dissipation of different parameters. The nonlinear finite element models were developed to carry out further parametric studies. The feasibility of FE analysis was validated by the experimental results. The parametric studies systematically show the effect rules of each parameter. A superposed method was proposed to calculate the shear strength of the joint with external stiffener. The theoretical formula provides an accurate result which accords well the test and FE analysis.