11.12: Derivation of the cyclic behaviour of components in bolted end‐plate beam‐to‐column joints using FEM

ABSTRACT In this paper a detailed procedure to isolate the main dissipative components of bolted end‐plate beam‐to‐column steel joints under cyclic loading, and to identify their force‐displacement relationships by analysing the stress and deformation fields in the FE models is proposed. The objective is generalise the component method prescribed in EC3‐1‐8 [1] extending it to reversal loading. It is worth noting that the proposed procedure is quite flexible, and that the assessment of the forces will depend on the idealized mechanical model, although the procedure can be easily adapted to any compatible mechanical model. A detailed numerical model of end‐plate bolted joints is developed using the ABAQUS FE package, capable of representing the various joints components and the several sources of nonlinearity associated to them. The numerical models were previously validated against monotonic and cyclic experimental test data obtained by the research team and with data available in the literature. The proposed procedure is then applied to the developed numerical models, of representative double‐extended end‐plate joints, the force‐displacement relationships are extracted and compared with those obtained from EC3–1–8.