A PILOT STUDY ON DEVELOPING FISH BONE-SHAPED BUCKLING-RESTRAINED BRACES

Abstract

 Buckling-restrained brace (BRB) has been proposed to absorb energy by plastic yielding of metallic core plate during an earthquake.
 As magnitudes of recent earthquakes increase, there is a potential that BRBs may rupture during a strong earthquake or repeated aftershocks, especially for bridge where large response displacement is concerned.
 This study is aimed at proposing a new type of light-weighted all-steel BRB, where the core plate is fish-bone shaped and is thus termed FB-BRB in this paper.
 Necking can be developed at several locations of an FB-BRB, and details to avoid strain concentration at stoppers are also proposed.
 Experimental study was carried out using four scaled specimens with different configurations.
 The failure mechanisms of the newly proposes FB-BRB have been verified, and favorable seismic per-formance of the dampers is also proved through comparison with that of a common BRB.