Fragility Assessment of Reduced Beam Section Moment Connections

Abstract

This paper presents fragility functions to estimate the probability of reaching or exceeding different damage states in reduced beam section (RBS) beam-to-column moment connections of steel moment resisting frames. The fragility functions are developed using results from 71 experimental tests that have been conducted on RBS connections during the past 14 years. The main sources of uncertainty considered are specimen-to-specimen variability of the interstory drifts associated with the various damage states and the epistemic uncertainty arising from using a limited number of experimental data and from interpreting experimental results. Quantitative measures for each of these two kinds of uncertainty were developed using statistical procedures. For a given peak interstory drift ratio the fragility functions developed herein permit the estimation of the probability of experiencing five different levels of damage in RBS moment connections.