EXPERIMENTS ON CRESCENT SHAPED BRACES

摘要

Different design strategies, within the Performance Based Design framework, havebeen proposed through the years in order to design a structure of high seismicperformances, including seismic isolation, viscous dampers and hysteretic dampers. Anew lateral-resisting device, referred to as Crescent Shaped Brace (CSB), has beenrecently proposed to be used for the story isolation of multi-story frame structures. Themain property of the CSB is that its lateral stiffness is uncoupled from its yield strengthso that the practical designer may choose them independently, unlike conventionaldiagonal braces whose lateral stiffness is directly proportional to the yield strength.Past studies were devoted to the development of analytical formula for the design ofsuch devices and to the study (through numerical simulations) of their non-linearresponse. In the present paper, the main results of experimental tests conducted onscaled CSB specimens (monotonic tests, cyclic tests, pseudo-static tests) are presentedin order to assess the seismic behavior of such devices. The results of the experimentaltests are compatible with the analytical predictions.