The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Tests of Zipper Frames

Leon, Roberto T.; Yang, Chuang-Sheng; Reinhorn, Andrei M.; Schachter, Macarena; Stojadinovic, Bozidar; Yang, T. Y.; Wei, Zhong; Shing, Pui-shum B.

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advances in Experimental Structural Engineering, 2005, Nagoya, Japan., 2005, PDF (304 KB)

This paper describes the initial collaborative experiences with an early NEES project conducted at Georgia Institute of Technology, University at Buffalo, University of Colorado at Boulder, and University of California, Berkeley. The vehicle used for the collaboration is the development of design provisions and analytical tools for zipper frames. Zipper frames are intended to improve on the behavior of conventional inverted-V-braced frames, which exhibit poor performance arising from the early buckling of the lower story braces. A zipper frame provides better performance by forcing simultaneous buckling of all braces, and in this work that behavior is tied to the use of an elastic hat truss at the top of the building, which prevents the formation of an overall collapse mechanism. The collaborative nature of the project arises from the need to test sample structures at several scales under both quasi-static and dynamic loading, and by the need to supplement such tests with much more economical subassemblage ones.

Available online: http://library.eerc.berkeley.edu/documents/200612/leon-et-al-zipper-frames.pdf