Experimental study on mechanical behavior of weld-free steel structure with knee brace damper using square tube column

On the contrary, for few spans building that is often constructed in Japan, it is reasonable to apply the bi-directional moment frame which is consisted

1 INTRODUCTION

After the Northridge earthquake and the Kobe earthquake, a lot of researches have been conducted to prevent brittle fracture at welded beam-to-column connections, and various new connections have been developed (Technical, 1996 and Recommended, 2000). We, also, have proposed an innovative structural system, that is called ‘weldfree’ system, as shown in Fig. 1 (Suita et al., 2004, Inoue et al., 2006 and Suita et al., 2006).