Estimation of strain hardening factor and ductility of a reduced beam section (RBS) connection

This paper presents a reduced beam section (RBS) approach via the introduction of two pairs of longitudinal voids in the beam web to enhance the ductility of post-Northridge connections. In order to achieve the highest connection ductility, using finite element method a parametric study was done on the geometry of such voids by considering three different sizes of SAC specimens, SAC3, SAC5 and SAC7. To generalize the design procedure and to make it to be applicable for other beam sections, the suitable equations were proposed to estimate the strain hardening factor, limiting value and ductility of RBS connections with longitudinal voids.