ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to investigate elastic plastic behaviour of a CHS column-to-beam connection without diaphragms in which the thickness of column at the connection is increased. In addition to vertical and horizontal loading tests, numerical calculations by the elastic plastic finite element method are performed to obtain experimental formulae for estimating the local strength of the connections. The results show that it is capable to restrain local flexural deformation of the heavy column wall without diaphragms and that the experimental formulae predict the local strengths of these connections with a high accuracy.
