ABSTRACT
Steel box-section piers with round corners have originally been proposed for the point of aesthetics. And, recently it has been found that their performance under seismic loadings is much better than that of normal wedge-edge piers (box-section steel piers without round corners). However, studies on influence of round corner on seismic resistance performance of box-section steel piers are hardly available to the author’s knowledge. Therefore, in this paper, influence of round corner on ultimate strength and energy absorption capacity of the piers are examined by using the finite element stability analysis. The ultimate strength and energy absorption capacity of unstiffened and stiffened round corner box-section steel piers under lateral increasing cyclic loading are examined by varying the size of the round corner. The ultimate strength and energy absorption capacity of normal wedge-edge box-section are also examined to compare with that of round corner steel piers. In the range of small size of the round corner, the ultimate strength and energy absorption capacity of the piers with round corners are almost the same as those of the piers without round corners. However, as the size of the round corner increases, the ultimate strength and energy absorption capacity increase not a little compared to that of the piers without round corners.
