Theory and Analysis of Structures 47-155
a member by a perfect elastic element between the plastic hinge locations. Furthermore, the elastic-plastic
hinge model assumes that material behavior changes abruptly from the elastic state to the fully yielded
state. The element under consideration exhibits a sudden stiffness reduction upon the formation of a
plastic hinge. This approach, therefore, overestimates the stiffness of a member loaded into the inelastic
range (Liew et al., 1993; White et al., 1991, 1993). This leads to further research and development of an
alternative method called the refined plastic hinge approach. This approach is based on the following
improvements to the elastic-plastic hinge model:
1. A column tangent modulus model E
t
is used in place of the elastic modulus E to represent the
distributed plasticity along the length of a member due to axial force effects. The member inelastic
stiffness, represented by the member axial and bending rigidities E
t
A and E
t
I, is assumed to be the
function of axial load only. In other words, E
t
A and E
t
I can be thought of as the properties of an
effective core of the section, considering column action only. The tangent modulus captures the
effect of early yielding in the cross-section due to residual stresses, which is believed to be the
cause for the low strength of inelastic column buckling. The tangent modulus approach has been
previously utilized by Orbison et al. (1982), Liew (1992), and White et al. (1993) to improve the
accuracy of the elastic-plastic hinge approach for structures in which members are subjected to
large axial forces.
2. Distributed plasticity effects associated with flexure are captured by gradually degrading the
member stiffness at the plastic hinge locations as yielding progresses under an increasing load as
the cross section strength is approached. Several models of this type have been proposed in recent
literature based on extensions to the elastic-plastic hinge approach (Powell and Chen, 1986), as
well as the tangent modulus inelastic hinge approach (Liew et al., 1993; White et al., 1993). The
rationale of modeling stiffness degradation associated with both axial and flexural actions is that
the tangent modulus model represents the column strength behavior in the limit of pure axial
compression, and the plastic hinge stiffness degradation model represents the beam behavior in
pure bending; thus the combined effects of these two approaches should also satisfy the cases in
which the member is subjected to combined axial compression and bending.
It has been shown that with the above two improvements, the refined plastic hinge model can be used
with sufficient accuracy to provide a quantitative assessment of a member’s performance up to failure.
Detailed descriptions of the method and discussion of the results generated by the method are given in
White et al. (1993) and Chen et al. (1996). Significant work has been done to implement the refined
plastic hinge methods for the design of three-dimensional real-size structures (Al-Bermani et al., 1995;
Liew et al., 2000).
Second-Order Spread of Plasticity Analysis
Spread of plasticity analyses can be classified into two main types, namely three-dimensional shell element
and two-dimensional beam-column approaches. In the three-dimensional spread of plasticity analysis,
the structure is modeled using a large number of finite three-dimensional shell elements, and the elastic
constitutive matrix, in the usual incremental stress–strain relations, is replaced by an elastic-plastic
constitutive matrix once yielding is detected. This analysis approach typically requires numerical inte-
gration for the evaluation of the stiffness matrix. Based on a deformation theory of plasticity, the
combined effects of normal and shear stresses may be accounted for. The three-dimensional spread-of-
plasticity analysis is computational intensive and best suited for analyzing small-scale structures.
The second approach for plastic-zone analysis is based on use of the beam-column theory, in which
the member is discretized into many beam-column segments, and the cross section of each segment is
further subdivided into a number of fibers. Inelasticity is typically modeled by the consideration of
normal stress only. When the computed stresses at the centroid of any fibers reach the uniaxial normal
strength of the material, the fiber is considered yielded. Compatibility is treated by assuming that full
continuity is retained throughout the volume of the structure in the same manner as for elastic range