VERIFYING THE PERFORMANCE OF STANDARD DUCTILE CONNECTIONS FOR SEMI-CONTINUOUS STEEL FRAMES.

It is proposed to revive the concept of semi-continuous design of steel frames. A set of predesigned standard ductile connections has been developed by the Steel Construction Institute. The authors believe that the recognized theoretical benefits of what was known traditionally as semi-rigid design can be unlocked by the application of plastic global analysis to frames with the standard connections. The properties of representative standard connections have been verified by full-scale destructive tests which are reported in this paper.