Beam-to-column joints, column bases and joint components under impact loading

peer reviewedRecent events such as natural catastrophes or terrorist attacks have highlighted the necessity to ensure the structural integrity of buildings under exceptional events. For more than 10 years, the University of Liege is strongly involved in researches on the response of structures further to such exceptional events through participations to national or European research projects. In particular, the University of Liege has contributed very recently to a European research project entitled ROBUSTIMPACT investigating the behaviour of steel or steel-concrete composite building structures subjected to impact loading and proposing simplified procedures to predict the response of such structures under the considered scenario. As a contribution to this research project, an experimental test campaign was realised in Liège; the objective was to study the behaviour of beam-to-column joints, of column bases and of most of their constitutive components under impact loading and, in particular, to highlight the influence of the strain rate effects on the response of the studied joints and components. The proposed paper first describes the conducted test campaign with all the required details about the tested specimens and the testing setup; then the analysis of the so-obtained experimental results is presented. Finally authors’ views on how to account for the strain rate effects in analytical approaches for joint design is briefly expressed