International Journal of Civil & Structural Engineering
Author(s) : SATISH KUMAR S R
Buckling Restrained Braces (BRBs) have been found to perform better than conventional braces in resisting cyclic lateral loads due to earthquakes. The tendency of a brace to undergo global buckling is resisted by a sleeve tube and concrete in between. The bond between the core and concrete is broken to ensure that only the core gets loaded. This also decouples the strength from the stiffness and it is possible to vary them independent of each other. The paper describes the cyclic tests on two BRBs of identical strength but slightly different stiffness and concludes that much work needs to be done to evaluate the optimum values for a particular structure.