EXPERIMENTS ON STATIC BEHAVIORS OF THE CAST STEEL JOINT IN A SIGHT-SEEING TOWER

摘要

Due to their aesthetic and structural advantages, cast steel joints are enjoying increasing popularity in modern building construction. The cast steel joint investigated in this paper is used in the sight- seeing tower of the Hangzhou Bay Bridges. The paper deals with the experimental analysis of the static behaviors of the cast steel joint. The security of it under the design load and the failure behavior are also researched. By comparing the results of the experiments and the numerical analysis, we can check the applicability of the FEM analysis and the reliability of the design. Before the experiments, the numerical analysis of the cast steel joint has been done to get the general results. In experiment, the 1:4 scale experimental models is used and the load added by actuators is enough for them to be destroyed. The results of the experimental and numerical analysis show that the cast steel joint is safe under the design load and the Von-Misses stress of each measuring point is less than the yield strength. When the load is added to 2.3 times of the design load, the cast steel joints are destroyed. The ultimate load and the failure behavior of the experimental models are nearly as the same as the results of the FEM analysis.