ABSTRACT
Stress concentration factor (SCF) analysis is carried out for welded T-joints made up of steel circular hollow section brace welded onto concrete-filled circular hollow section chord. A finite element model has been developed employing ABAQUS software to simulate the performance of T-joints with concrete-filled chords under axial force on the brace. Modelling of the weld profile has been included in the simulation. An 8-node 3D hexahedral solid element with full integration scheme has been employed in the simulation. The interaction between the chord and concrete filling has been assumed to be due to friction only. The hot spot stresses have been obtained by linear extrapolation of the stresses in the region recommended by CIDECT. The outcome of the numerical simulation is verified using existing experimental results obtained by Wang et al. (2013)
