Proposed Updates to Steel Building Standard Could Enhance Earthquake Resilience

Proposed Updates to Steel Building Standard Could Enhance Earthquake Resilience

The researchers fastened 48 steel columns of varying dimensions into a hydraulic system called a shake table that thrusted one end of each column back and forth, replicating the shaking motions of an earthquake.


Credit: UC San Diego


Since the mid-1990s, a type of steel column that commonly features slender cross-sectional elements has become more prevalent in buildings along the West Coast of the United States and in other seismically active regions. Although these columns have complied with modern design standards, our understanding of how they would perform during an earthquake has been limited by a lack of full-scale testing.


Using an earthquake-simulating device known as a shake table, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego) identified deficiencies in the performance of these columns, with many buckling prematurely. Based on the results, documented in a NIST report, and a detailed analysis of the test data, the researchers devised new limits for column slenderness, described in a paper published in the Journal of Structural Engineering last April. The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), a standards organization, has adopted the proposed limits in a draft for public feedback of the 2022 edition of AISC 341, a standard that provides guidance on designing earthquake-resistant steel buildings. 


“A lot of current design provisions are based on scaled-down column tests or a very small number of full-scale tests. But the full-scale testing we conducted here has allowed us to begin filling in the know ..

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