ABSTRACT
To assess the present state of the art on quasi-static cycling testing, a quite large bibliographic research, performed on the last 20 years publications, gave about 200 papers. The official test procedures considered in this literature are mainly the 1986 European ECCS-45 (European Convention For Constructional Steelwork “Recommended Testing Procedure for Assessing the Behaviour of Structural Steel Elements under Cyclic Loads) and the 1992 North-American ATC-24 (Applied Technology Council-24 “Guidelines For Cyclic Seismic Testing of Components of Steel Structures”). Some recent papers adopt the new procedures from ANSI, mainly ANSI/AISC 341s1-05, appendix S of November 2005 and a more recent testing protocol, FEMA 461 (June 2007) Interim Testing Protocols for Determining the Seismic Performance Characteristics of Structural and Non-structural Components. Many papers, especially from Japanese authors, don’t indicate explicitly an official procedure, but the loading histories applied are generally similar to the ECCS or ATC-24 protocols. The majority of the structural elements tested are beam-to-column connections; other elements tested are mainly composite columns and braces.
