High Strength Steel and Fuse Dissipative Solutions for Seismic Resistant Building Structures

Abstract

The robustness of structures against severe seismic action is ensured by their global performance, in terms of ductility stiffness and strength, properly calibrated. The “plastic“ members of ductile Mild Carbon Steel ‐ MCS – (S235 to S355) will dissipate the seismic energy, acting as “structural fuses“, while the “elastic“ members, must be provided of adequate overstrength, to have the capacity to carry the supplementary stresses after the plastic hinges have been formed and the redistribution forces were occurred. For these elastic members, High Strength Steels (HSS), such as S460 to S690, might be used, provide them the necessary overstrength, without enhancing the stiffness, because that could unbalance the structural system. These structures, which combine HSS with MCS, are termed Dual‐Steel (DS). The braced frames can be equipped with detachable dissipative MCS members, which are acting as seismic fuses. In case of CBF, the fuses might be the Buckling Restrained Braces (BRB), while for EBF, the links could take this role. In case of MRF, Steel Plate Shear Walls (SW) can be used as fuses. To make possibly to replace the used fuses, the HSS elastic part of the structure, has the mission to re‐centring the structure after the earthquake. This is the subject of present paper.

Behavior of steel building structures subjected to strong and benchmark seismic actions: An overview of damage from the observations of the last 40 years

“…Furthermore, the application of the "column tree concept" is also a suitable solution, where shop welded and field bolted connections are employed (beam-column shop welded connection and a field bolted splice of beams, applied at a point of low bending moment, within the beam span). Finally, a simple conforming rule is to use higher steel quality for columns than the beams, forcing the formation of the plastic hinge in a region of lower strength (i.e., columns made from steel quality S355 or S460 and beams from steel quality S235 or S275, or even S355 when the steel quality of the column is S460) [79,80,81]. Generalizing this rule, for elements that by definition are preferred to remain in the elastic region, a higher steel quality should be employed.…”