dual moment resisting-shear link frames: experimental and numerical investigation

This paper provides the experimental and numerical results of a novel dual lateral load resisting system. this dual system is proposed to combine the flexural and shear nonlinear behavior of moment resisting frames (mrfs) with different lengths. in this dual system, mrfs are combined with frames that have a shear link with a smaller cross-section at the mid-span. this combination transfers the first plastic hinges location from the beam ends of the mrfs to the mid-span of the shear link frames. two 1/3-scale tests are performed in the strong floor laboratory, and the frames are tested under quasi-static cyclic loading. in addition to increasing the system’s stiffness, the novel dual system waives the code requirement to satisfy the beam span-to-depth (span/depth) ratio constraint. besides, the new dual system improves the system’s resilience due to the substitutability of the shear link after an earthquake. in this research, verified 3d finite element models of the moment resisting-shear link frames dual system are also used to demonstrate the performance of the new dual system. the results demonstrate that when an mrf-slf dual system and a conventional system are designed with the same strength and drift targets, the equivalent plastic strain (peeq) of the mrf-slf dual system is approximately 20% lower than that of the conventional system at the same drifts. meanwhile, the initial stiffness and strength of these two systems are nearly identical.