Design, fabrication, and experimental investigation of steel core buckling restrained braces (BRBs)

Abstract

Buckling restrained braces (BRBs), being a sort of metallic damper, display a balanced hysteretic behavior by yielding under tension and compression forces during major earthquakes. The study presents experimental findings and evaluations from hysteretic behaviors of BRBs having different steel core material and end connection details under reversed cyclic displacements. For the tested BRBs, force-displacement hysteretic curves, dissipated hysteretic energies, and effective damping ratios obtained from hysteretic curves are calculated and compared. Experimental results reveal that the BRBs developed here with unique details display sufficient performance and this performance could be improved by similar forthcoming studies.