New performance-based plastic design and evaluation of blind bolted end-plate CFT composite frames with BRBs

The blind bolted end-plate connection to concrete-filled steel tube column (BECFT) composite frame with buckling-restrained braces (BRBs, BRB-BECFT) is a novel dual structure system that combines advantages of fast assembly ability for BECFT connections, great energy dissipation capacity for BRBs coupled with BECFT connections and superior gravity load-carrying capacity for concrete-filled steel tube (CFT) columns. Given authors’ prior experimental and theoretical studies on the BRB-BECFT structure system, and as no design method is as far introduced for this system with adequate accuracy, a new plastic design procedure based on the modified energy balance and global yield mechanism in the framework of performance-based plastic design method was proposed. The post-yielding stiffness and overall yield inter-story drift of the BRB-BECFT structure system was considered to improve the accuracy of the design base shear. Meanwhile, the BRB-BECFT structure system was decomposed into the BRB system and BECFT frame system to simplify the design process. Moreover, some formulae to avoid structural adverse yield mechanism were derived. The semi-rigid characteristic of BECFT connections was introduced into the structural global yield mechanism by work-energy principle to ensure the deformation consistency between inter-story drift and BECFT connection rotation. Finally, four prototype structures with 6, 9, 12 and, 20 stories were designed as examples to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed design method. The results of nonlinear time-history analyses showed that the designed structures successfully achieved the pre-selected performance objectives in terms of the inter-story drift, residual drift, BECFT connection rotation, and BRB ductility demands.