Development of Near-Field Earthquake Loading Protocols for the Steel Moment Connections in Iran

Steel moment frame buildings are widely used in Iran and around the world. The observations from major earthquakes underscored the importance of the beam-to-column connections in seismic force-resisting systems and their influence on such building’s performance. Since the most catastrophic earthquakes that occurred in Iran contained the characteristics of near-field earthquakes, hence understanding the behavior of these connections under such earthquakes is needed. This study proposed loading protocols for special steel moment-resisting frame systems under near-field earthquakes in Iran. Each of them had 23 damage half-cycles with a maximum inter-story drift of 0.065 radians. The proposed loading protocols were compared numerically to each other. The most influential one was chosen as the main loading protocol since it has the most destructive effect on the connection. The main loading protocol showed a faster rate of increase in the plastic strain and imposed the highest amount of dissipated energy at a former loading stage compared to other near-field earthquake loading protocols related to other countries such as SAC and Fang et al.