Shop drawings and technical drawings aided in the dimensioning of the test setup.

The shear tab

was modelled as one part with the stiffener plates on a portion of the column extending 100 mm
from the top and bottom of the stiffener plates. This additional 100 mm was to prevent sudden
changes in mesh size to occur right at the connection, potentially leading to inaccurate results. A
coarse mesh can result in convergence issues or unreliable results in areas of high deformation,
particularly due to the calculation of stresses and strains based on displacement gradients. For
the same reason, the beam near the connection part extended approximately 50 mm beyond the
edge of the loading plate at the location of the main actuator. There was no consideration of
weld tearing in the FE models since many uncertainties are introduced when modelling damage
initiation and propagation. As well, the weld material properties were unknown.

All bolt holes were 1/16” larger than the bolt diameter as specified in the AISC Manual 15th Ed.
(2017) Table J3.3. The bolt shaft was drawn exactly the length of the beam web plus the thickness
of the shear tab; this allowed the bolt head and nut to be in contact with the beam web and shear
plate as they were when snug-tightened in the laboratory tests.

The AutoCAD drawings were imported into Abaqus as homogenous, deformable, solid parts.
They were partitioned to simplify the geometry and ease the meshing. This avoids having
distorted elements and gives freedom to specify different mesh sizes in various locations of the
same part.

3.4.2 Property Module

In this Module, the different material properties were defined. Similar to the dimensions of each
part, the measured properties were used whenever possible and probable properties were used
otherwise. Coupon tests were performed for the beams and shear plates, but material properties
for the columns were not measured.

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Abaqus requires the true stress-strain data to adequately capture the steel necking, since finite
element modelling considers large deformations and displacements. Therefore, as mentioned in
Section 3.2, the true stress-strain curves were derived using Equations 3-3 and 3-4.

In Abaqus, the required elastic properties are Young’s Modulus (E) and Poisson’s ratio (taken as
0.3). The plastic properties required are the data points along the true stress-strain curve,
beginning at the yield point. The plastic region of the true stress-strain data of an A325 bolt is
shown in Table 3.3 and was taken from the literature (Kulak et al., 2001).

Table 3.3: Plastic Region of True Stress-Strain Data of A325 Bolts

Yield Stress (MPa) Plastic Strain

637 0
680.6 0.002084
720.2 0.004872
745.8 0.007645
757.8 0.011089
766.7 0.016569
795.9 0.023389
839.1 0.034867
863.4 0.046207
896.6 0.080005

The loading plates located between the beam and the actuators transferred the load evenly,
without causing localized damage. Elastic properties were used since they were not the focus of
the test. The stiffeners on the beam at the location of the main actuator were also assumed to
have elastic properties. Finally, the stabilizer plates above and below the shear plates had the
same true stress-strain curve as the shear plate of the same thickness. This is based on the
knowledge that the stiffener plates were fabricated from the same steel plate as the shear tabs.

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 3.4.3 Assembly Module

All the parts were then brought into the Assembly Module as dependent part instances.
Dependent part instances were used since they are pointers to the original part. Therefore they
cannot be meshed as an instance, but rather must be meshed as a part. For example there was
only one bolt part but several instances of this part in the Assembly. On the contrary,
independent part instances are a copy of the geometry of the original part. In this case, each
instance is meshed rather than the part itself. This consumes more memory resources than using
dependent part instances (Simulia User Assistance, 2018).

All parts were initially in contact except for the bolts. Since there was no way of determining the
exact contact points of the bolts within the bolt holes of the beam and shear plate, the bolt shank
was initially presumed to be at the centre of the bolt hole in the numerical models.

3.4.4 Step Module

All Abaqus models have an “Initial” default step which cannot be edited. Boundary conditions are
typically initiated in this step. In the full-scale tests, some force was applied to the bolts when
they were snug-tightened. To simulate this initial pretension force prior to the initiation of
loading, a Static, General Procedure Type step “Preload” was created after the “Initial” step. A
general step means that the starting conditions of the step are the ending conditions of the
previous general step. The step times of all general steps add up to the total time of the analysis.
Therefore, the step time of the “Preload” step was 0.1; which was small in comparison to the
subsequent step in which the loads were applied. Nonlinear geometry was turned on and
remained activated for the entirety of the analysis. This accounted for the nonlinear effects from
large displacements and deformations. If the model was expected to undergo small
displacements, nonlinear effects may have been ignored; however, in the case of the shear tab
connections, which were loaded to failure, large deformations were expected and as such,
nonlinear effects had to be included. To continue with the definition of the “Preload” step, a
small initial increment size of 0.001 was used to avoid convergence problems. Also, automatic
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incrementation was used to allow the increment sizes to vary between specified limits. Finally,
the matrix storage was set to unsymmetric. Abaqus can automatically determine which type of
matrix storage to use or it can be explicitly defined by the user. The stiffness matrix is used
regardless if the analysis is linear (solved by Stiffness Method) or nonlinear (solved by Newton’s
Method). The unsymmetric matrix storage is suggested when the friction coefficient is greater
than 0.2 which was the case for these steel shear tab models (coefficient of 0.3).

Second, the “Loading” step was defined. All parameters were identical to the “Preload” step
except for the step time. Since the actuator displacements were applied in this step, a larger step
size of 1.0 was used. Therefore the total time of the analysis was 1.1.

In the Step Module, Field Output Requests and History Output Requests were specified. Field
outputs are infrequent requests for a large portion of the model. Complete sets of basic variables
(ex: all the stress components) can be requested rather than specific components of basic
variables. History outputs are frequent output requests for small portions of the model. Contrary
to field output requests, history output requests can include individual variables (ex: stress in U1
direction).

In the laboratory tests, instrumentation was used to record the displacement, rotation, force and
strain of specific locations on the test setup. Therefore, sets were created in the Assembly
Module at the instrumentation locations to then output history requests based on these defined
sets. In general, these included: shear tab vertical displacement, shear tab out-of-plane
displacement, beam lateral displacement, beam vertical displacement, bolt vertical
displacement, rotation of beam near connection, rotation of beam near the tip, rotation of the
column, load cells on the column, displacement of main actuator, and displacement of tip
actuator.

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 3.4.5 Interaction Module

The Interaction Module defines the contact properties and locations of the assembly which are
in contact or which can come into contact upon deformation. In the shear tab models, there were
two interaction properties: steel-to-steel contact, and frictionless rollers at the points of loading.
The friction between steel and steel was defined as the “Friction” property. It had both tangential
and normal behaviours. The tangential behaviour was defined as follows:

 Friction formulation: Penalty

 Directionality: Isotropic

 Friction coefficient: 0.3

The friction formulation “Penalty” uses the basic Coulomb friction model. This relates the
maximum allowable frictional shear stress to the contact pressure between the two bodies in
contact (SIMULIA, 2018). Therefore, the surfaces carry shear stresses up until a certain limit when
they begin to slide with respect to one another (Figure 3.10). Isotropic means that the coefficient
of friction is the same in all directions. The chosen coefficient of friction of 0.3 was suggested for
steel-to-steel contact in the literature (see Chapter 2 Literature Review).

Figure 3.10: Slip Region for the Basic Coulomb Friction Model (SIMULIA, 2018)

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