Investigation of behaviour of welded joint in steel frame structures

Tests conducted at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Zagreb were performed on welded single-sided steel beam-to-column joints made out of I sections and loaded with static load. The nonlinear numerical analysis of joint specimen behaviour through the finite element method was performed using the COSMOS/M computer programme. The aim of these tests was to investigate real welded joint behaviour (Mj-fi curve), and to find the relevant component or mode of joint failure. The results have shown that there is a good correspondence between the laboratory tests and the numerical analysis up to the area of extreme nonlinearity.