Super - Low - Cycle Fatigue Behavior of Steel Pier Base Joint

Abstract

Since the number of excessive seismic loading cycles is observed to be less than ten, such very short term loading experiments are conducted to investigate the super - low - cycle fatigue behavior of steel pier base joint. Cracks are initiated in such an early stage as the second cycle at the inter section of a longitudinal corner weld between a column flange and a column web and a transverse fillet weld between a column flange and a base plate, and prop agated to fracture a flange plate rapidly after corner welds are broken. The crack initiation life can be evaluated by means of elasto - plastic finite element analysis, using a cyclic stress-strain curve.