| This thesis discusses the findings of a research project on analysis and design of bare and wall-framed steel structures. Extensive numerical examples have been employed to verify the proposed theory. The thesis further proposes an efficient and reliable computational tool for routine and advanced design of structures of steel material.;It is common to note that many structural failures and collapses are due to structural instability which is more difficult and complex to consider than material yielding in the design context. For columns and bracings under large axial forces flexural buckling would tend to occur, whereas beams subjected to bending moments about their major axes may have lateral-torsional buckling. Meanwhile, the initial imperfections, including the global frame imperfection and the local member imperfection, should always be taken into account. Apart from the foregoing problems in practical engineering design, the contribution of structural walls and floor slabs are also commonly ignored in most previous second-order analysis. Thus, the applications of previous research are limited to bare steel frames.;In this thesis, a curved stability function element is formulated for nonlinear second-order analysis and design of steel frames. Further, a flat shell element superimposed by a membrane element and a Mindlin type plate bending element is proposed for modeling and analysis of plated skeletal structures. To account for the lateral-torsional buckling, an integrated elastic buckling analysis by shell finite element and empirical equation as per the modified Perry-Robertson formulae is proposed to predict the design lateral-torsional buckling moment of beams. To capture both the in-plane and out-of-plane behavior of structural walls, a shell element model is proposed for second-order analysis and design of wall-framed structures. In response to severe damage due to earthquake, a practical application by extending the proposed second-order analysis method for performance-based seismic design based on the pushover analysis procedure is developed.;Keywords: Finite element method; second-order analysis; steel design; shell element; wall-framed structure; pushover analysis... |
