Seismic design and tests of a full-scale one-story one-bay steel frame with a dual-core self-centering brace

•The paper presents seismic design and tests of a steel frame with a dual-core selfcentering brace.•Eight tests were conducted on a full-scale one-story one-bay braced frame specimen to evaluate the system performance.•The frame specimen had minor beam local buckling and no damage in the brace.•Nonlinear time history analyses were conducted to obtain seismic demands of the prototype braced frame.

Traditional seismic resisting systems in a large earthquake can experience significant damage and residual drifts due to energy dissipation of structural members, which leads to difficult or expensive repairs. A steel dual-core self-centering brace (DC-SCB), which utilizes three steel bracing members, two friction devices, and two sets of tensioning elements that are in a parallel arrangement for doubling its axial deformation, has been proposed and validated to provide both the energy dissipation and self-centering properties to seismic resisting systems. A prototype three-story steel dual-core self-centering braced frame (DC-SCBF) was designed, and its full-scale first-story one-bay DC-SCBF was tested to (1) validate the system response, (2) study force distributions in framing members as damage progresses in the DC-SCB, beam or columns, and (3) investigate the repair and replacement characteristics of the frame. The DC-SCBF subassembly specimen showed beam and column yielding at 1% lateral drift, beam local buckling at 1.5% lateral drift and no damage in the brace at 2% lateral drift; the residual drift that was caused by beam yielding or local buckling was 0.3–0.5% after multiple tests. Nonlinear time history analyses were performed on the prototype braced frame to obtain seismic demands under both design and maximum considerable levels of earthquakes.