Compressive Behaviors of Steel Braces with Different Sectional Shapes

Steel braces are an essential structural element to resist lateral seismic forces and widely utilized in various types of buildings. The primary source of load carrying capacity in steel braced frames is through buckling and yielding of diagonal braces. Hysteretic behaviors of steel braces exhibit unsymmetric properties in tension and compression. Especially, they show significant strength degradation when loaded into the inelastic range in compression. Therefore, the governing failure modes of steel braces shall be global buckling in compression and this phenomenon shall occur prior to brittle limit states such as net section rupture or local buckling of elements. Except for effects of material properties, most of influential parameters is strongly related to the configuration and sectional shape of steel braces. Of them, the objective of this study is to investigate effects of sectional shapes on compressive behaviors of steel braces. Especially, this study focuses on the variation in the plastic hinge rotation and residual deformation of steel braces with representative sectional shapes which are typically applied on the construction field.