Seismic performance of high-strength steel moment-resisting frames

Steel Moment Resisting Frames (MRF) are widely used in modern building and industrial structures owing to their large ductility and dissipative capacity. To achieve this excellent overall behavior, capacity design principles in seismic codes force to design frames having strong columns and weak beams. The Dual-Steel concept, which is the combined use of High Strength Steel (HSS) for columns and Mild Carbon Steel (MCS) for beams, guarantees a better control of the global behavior in order to achieve the occurrence of plastic hinges in ductile members. These considerations motivated the study presented in this paper. In particular, the results of a numerical study aimed to characterize the seismic response of Dual-Steel MRFs are presented and discussed.