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Seismic mitigation of steel modular building structures through innovative inter-modular connections

S. V. Sendanayake, D. Thambiratnam, N. Perera, T. Chan, S. Aghdamy

Heliyon, 2019

59 citations

Abstract

Steel modular building structures are being increasingly adopted for a variety of building applications since their method of construction, despite being relatively new, offers many benefits over conventional constructional methods. Even though their behaviour under gravity (dead and live) loads is generally well understood, their response to lateral dynamic loads such as seismic and wind loads, is relatively less known. Due to their unique structural detailing, their structural response and failure patterns under lateral dynamic loading can vary considerably from that exhibited by conventional structures. Limited research has shown that under lateral loadings, modular structures tend to fail at the columns which are critical members whose failure can lead to partial or total collapse of the structure. This paper aims to mitigate this by shifting the failure away from the columns to inter-modular connections which can be allowed to deform in a ductile manner. Towards this end, this paper proposes two innovative inter-modular connections and investigates their performance under monotonic and cyclic lateral loading using comprehensive validated numerical techniques. The proposed connections have an additional steel plate and resilient layers to provide increased ductility and dissipation of seismic energy with desired ductile failure mechanisms. Three-dimensional numerical models of the proposed connections are developed in ABAQUS software considering geometric and material…

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