ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a method called the refined plastic hinge approach. It defines the scope and the assumptions involved in the development of plastic hinge based elements suitable for inelastic analysis of planar steel frames. The chapter discusses the modeling of frame and truss elements that can undergo large rigid-body displacements, focuses on the formulation of the elastic-plastic hinge model, and provides the framework for the development of the refined plastic hinge method. It outlines the development of the refined plastic hinge model, and presents a procedure that incorporates connection nonlinear effects in the analysis of two-dimensional steel frames. The chapter discusses the numerical procedures, and provides some thoughts for implementing the second-order plastic hinge based analyses using a tangentstiffness iteration technique. It describes the user's manual of a second-order plastic hinge based analysis program developed by the authors.
