| Research Abstract |
Steel rigid frame piers are frequently subjected to cyclic actions such as earthquakes. Under such circumstances, stress level of steel piers may exceed elastic limit of structural steels, which requires pertinent inelastic stress-strain relationships for structural steels in order to describe the cyclic deformation behavior of steel piers.
A number of numerical strategies for elasto-plastic analyses are available in the literature. Among them, incremental-iterative solution techniques are commonly used in relation to the finite element analysis. In those techniques, each step consists of an increment of external load and subsequent iterations to restore equilibrium. The major difficulty in the nonlinear solution scheme is numerical convergence. The commercial FEM codes seem to be powerful in dealing with the nonlinear problems of cyclic plasticity.
The purpose of the present paper is to demonstrate an elasto-plastic FEM analysis of steel rigid frame piers under cyclic loading, in which the effects of local buckling on the cyclic behavior of steel piers are examined from the numerical simulation.
As a result, it can be concluded that the present FEM analysis can be used to any steel piers under cyclic loading so long as pertinent elasto-plastic constitutive equations are used, and that load carrying capacity of steel frames under cyclic loading depends largely on the redundancy of the structural system.
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