MOMENT RESISTING WELDED CONNECTIONS: AN EXTENSIVE REVIEW OF DESIGN PRACTICE AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH IN USA,JAPAN AND EUROPE

Welded connections, widely used in seismic moment resisting frames (MRFs) in USA, Japan and Europe, have been extensively investigated during the 1990s in order to improve their performance under severe earthquakes. In order to correctly evaluate the results of experimental research on welded connections, the differences among the American, Japanese and European current practices in designing the frame structural systems and in detailing the beam-to-column connections should be firstly appraised. In this paper, the major aspects characterising the USA, Japan and Europe design practice in moment resisting welded connections are reported, the differences are underlined and the main issues recently addressed in experimental research are reviewed. Among the several parameters which affect the connection performance, attention is focused on the effect of the beam cross-section size. Thus conclusions are drawn in terms of plastic rotation capacity as dependant on the beam size.