This study is aimed at clarifying ductile crack initiation properties of thick-walled steel beam-column members with different welding conditions and defects in the beam-column connection, and verifying an evaluation method of ductile crack initiation using a damage index. To this end, elasto-plastic analyses using the solid element model are performed in order to investigate strain along the welding defects and to calculate damage in the beam-column connection. As a result, it is shown that the ductile crack initiation in the steel beam-column connection with welding defects can be predicted with good accuracy by using the damage index. Moreover, it is also found that the location of crack occurrence cannot be predicted in some cases by the present model, though the utility of the model using solid elements has been verified by the comparison with the results of the experiment.
