ABSTRACT
One of the important surprises of the Northridge and Kobe earthquakes was the widespread and unanticipated brittle fractures in welded steel beam-to-column connections. Since then, numerous research programmes have been conducted to improve the performance of moment loaded connections. As part of a project to develop and evaluate a new design concept, Miura et al. (2002) reported the results on three beam-to-RHS-column connections without weld-access holes under cyclic loading. The large-scale specimens included both welded and bolted connections. The current study presents numerical simulations of two of the three specimens tested by Miura et al. (2002) employing the explicit solution technique. Various issues of the explicit FE strategy such as mesh density, computational time and numerical simulation of the loading process are addressed. A comparison between the experimental and numerical hysteresis loops is presented. In addition, the advantages of the use of the explicit method relative to the implicit approach are highlighted.
