Promotion of cyclic behavior of reduced beam section connections restraining beam web to local buckling

This paper is to find out a convenient method to mitigate buckling severity in the beams with reduced beam section (RBS) connections. A new detail was proposed to enhance the RBS performance by delaying beam buckling. The efficiency of the proposed detail was investigated by a large scale laboratory testing under cyclic loading. The results showed that the proposed RBS connection had superior performance as compared with the conventional one. The proposed detail increased plastic rotation capacity of the conventional RBS connection by 40%. Moreover, some numerical and analytical analyses were provided to better justify how the proposed detail works.