Prediction of Column Axial Forces in Inverted V-braced Seismic Steel Frames Considering Brace Buckling

Abstract

Brace buckling in inverted-V-braced frames induces the vertical unbalanced force. The columns in the braced bay should be designed, per the capacity design concept, to remain elastic for gravity load actions and additional column axial forces that result from the brace buckling. However, owing to the difficulty in accumulating the buckling-induced column forces from different stories, empirical and often conservative approaches have been used in design practice. In this paper, three combination rules for a rational estimation of the column axial forces are proposed. The idea central to the three methods is to detect the stories with high buckling potential as precisely as possible by using pushover analysis and/or simple demand-to-capacity analysis. The vertical unbalanced forces in the stories detected as high buckling potential are then summed in a linear manner, whereas those otherwise are combined by following the SRSS (square root of sum of squares) rule. The accuracy and design advantage of the three methods is evaluated on the basis of extensive inelastic dynamic analyses. The mode shape-based method (MSBM), which is both simple and accurate, is recommended as the method of choice for practicing engineers among the three proposed.