Grouted shear stud connection for steel bridge substructures

•The GSS connection was shown to successfully relocate the plastic hinge away from weld.•The proposed connection was shown to be tolerant to construction errors.•Axial load slightly reduced deformation capacity of the system.•Dynamic response was shown to be superior to that observed under controlled loading.

This paper discusses the seismic performance of composite connections designed to capacity protect critical welded regions of steel bridge pier connections. Past research has shown that directly welding hollow circular steel pipes to a steel cap beam, regardless of weld configuration, does not mitigate the undesirable failure mode of brittle cracking in the welded region. Hence, capacity protection of the welds becomes an attractive option. A new detail proposed in this paper consists of a composite connection intended to relocate the plastic hinge away from the weld interface. Through full scale quasi-static testing, nonlinear FEA, and scaled shake table testing the connection was shown to perform well.