The Journal of Constructional Steel Research provides an international forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest advances in the research of structural steel and its applications.
The researchers and professors of the School Beatriz Gil, Rufino Goñi and Eduardo Bayo, together with the student María Fábregas, have published in it the article Design and testing of steel additive-manufactured moment-resistant beam-to-column connection.
We share with you the abstract of article to learn more about research:
"The proposal connection presents a better performance than conventional ones. The goal of this research is to study an alternative to conventional steel beam-column moment resisting connections by means of design of optimized connections made by additive manufacturing using steel. The proposed design aims to meet design criteria such as the following: the connection must be moment resisting, and the different structural elements must be joined as easily as possible, allowing their connection and disconnection and, consequently, the reuse of steel. The design is achieved through the application of Structural Topological Optimization tools of TOSCA software, and verified by ABAQUS finite element analysis. The proposed design optimizes the material and leads to a uniform and optimized stress distribution. This results in a significant weight reduction.
The final design was printed with S316 stainless steel using the Selective Laser Melting technique and tested under proportional loads until failure. A finite element model was used to validate the experimental results. With the validated model , the behavior of the proposal connection under proportional and non-proportional loads was compared with that of a connection executed by traditional means (welded and bolted plates), as well as with a conventional all-welded connection. The proposal connection performs better than the other connections in terms of stiffness and strength. In fact, compared to the conventional welded connection, the stiffness and strength values of the optimized design are much higher. Moreover, the significantly higher values of the stiffness/weight and strength/weight ratios highlight the efficiency of the proposed design ."
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