GEOMETRICAL AND METALLURGICAL NOTCHES OF WELDED JOINTS OF STEEL BEAM-TO-COLUMN CONNECTIONS

The necessity of finding a design method was awakened for preventing brittle fracture which was observed at beam-to-column connections in steel moment frames in Kobe at the event of the 1995 Hyogoken-Nanbu Earthquake. The plastic deformation capacity until brittle fracture is an important variable for the design, while is of much uncertainty in the past experimental data due to weld. Then artificial notched specimens without weld are required for investigating the effects of earthquake motion on the fracture resistance. However, it is useless if the stress-strain states of actual beam-to-column connections are not represented by those of artificial specimens. In this paper, notch models were constructed based on the investigation of geometrical and metallurgical discontinuities brought by welding of actual beam-to-column connections. The stress-strain states of the notch models were studied by FEM analysis. Then notched specimens made of base material, which are called equivalent models, are designed for representing the stress-strain states of the actual connections.