JOINT CHARACTERISTICS OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE WOODEN FRAMES

The wooden frames of the remains of traditional Chinese architecture w ere built up using plug-slot type of beam-to-column connections withou t using any metal nails or bolts. One type of these connections common ly found in primary frames has been studied. Three different types of artificially degraded connections that imitate those deteriorated cond itions naturally were investigated experimentally, The behaviour of th ese connections is found to be semirigid, They can be simulated by a t hree-parameter connection model, The effects of semirigid connections on frames were also studied through tests and the second-order elastic analysis by the Newton-Raphson method, It is shown that the behaviour of the frame is dominated by the characteristics of the connections, The proposed numerical method can accurately predict the response of t he partially restrained wooden frame. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Scie nce Ltd.