Serviceability Design of Beams for Non-Sway Composite Frames with Semi-rigid Connections

摘要

This paper presents a simplified method to calculate the beam deflections for non-sway composite frames with semi-rigid connections at the serviceability limit state. For the requirement of practical design, a simplified equation and design chart for determining connection secant stiffness, that take into account both joint flexibility and beam and column sectional properties, were formulated. Furthermore, an example was used to validate the method. It is shown that the calculation method of deflections is relatively insensitive to linear simplification of connection moment-rotation response; it is inconvenient to use tangent stiffness and inaccuracy to use initial tangent stiffness representing the nonlinear moment-rotation characteristics of connections, while the calculation formula of secant stiffness can reduce the work of computation and analysis of frames and avoid error with which previous scholars applied some certainty secant stiffness to analyze the beam deflections.