Effect of Easy Going Steel Concept on the Behavior of Diagonal Eccentrically Braced Frames

From the time that civil engineers have used steel in building structures, they tried to increase its strength so as to produce more economic and lighter structures by using more elegant sections. Increase of steel strength is not always useful for all members of a steel structure. In some members under certain conditions, it is needed to reduce the strength as much as possible to improve the behavior of structure. By using very low strength steel according to the Easy Going Steel (EGS) concept in this research, it is shown that the performance of diagonal Eccentrically Braced Frames (EBFs) improves substantially. For this purpose, a finite element analysis was used to simulate diagonal eccentrically braced frames. Fifteen diagonal eccentrically braced frames were designed through AISC2005. By substitutingvery low strength steelinstead of carbon steel with equal strength in the links, their performance improve fundamentally without any global or local instability in their links.