ABSTRACT
The ‘dog-bone’ concept is a very efficient way to control the formation of plastic mechanisms, in order to provide a ductile behaviour of steel frames. The only disadvantage of this solution seems to be the difficulty of repairing the beams damaged by severe earthquakes. In the authors’ conception, each dog-bone should consist of a bolt connected element. Only those elements (which are easy to replace) are supposed to undergo post-elastic deformations, while the rest of the structure remains in the elastic range. According to the ‘dog-bone’ principle, they must be weaker than the connected beams. Constructional details and the analysis of the strength and ductility that can be obtained by applying the proposed solution, are presented.
