The cyclic behavior of steel-polyoxymethylene composite braces

Steel tubular buckling controlled braces are well known as being simple, practical and cost-effective lateral force resisting systems. Although these system features have gained the attention of the researchers over the last decade, steel tubular buckling controlled braces currently have limited application. Indeed, only a few steel tubes tightly encased within each other exist in the steel industry. In this paper, a new and practical design method is proposed in order to better promote the widespeared application for current steel tubular buckling controlled brace applications. In order to reach this goal, a holed-adapter made with polyoxymethylene adaptable to all round and square steel sections, was developed to use as infiller. The research program presents designing, producing and displacement controlled cyclic loading tests of a conventional tubular brace and a buckling controlled composite brace. In addition, numerical analysis was carried out to compare the experimental results. As a result of the experimental studies, buckling was controlled up to 0.88 % drift ratio and the energy dissipation capacity of the conventional tubular brace increased 1.46 times due to the proposed design. The main conclusion of this research is that polyoxymethylene is a highly suitable material for the production of steel tubular buckling controlled braces.