Investigating the behavior of a modular prefabricated steel moment connection with the through-plate panel zone system

Prefabricated steel connections are one of the innovations in the area of prefabricated steel frames that have been proposed by many researchers. In beam-to-column rigid connections, joining a beam with different angles to the column is difficult so that connecting more than four beams to the box column becomes impossible. In this study, a prefabricated steel rigid connection is proposed that allows to connect beams in a rigid form with any angle to columns using a through plate panel zone system. To this aim, several analyses were performed on the proposed connection using ABAQUS. To verify the finite element (FE) results, firstly, a prefabricated steel connection was modeled in ABAQUS and the results were then compared with the experimental model. Design formulations were also presented and validated by comparing them with finite element modeling. Afterward, the effect of different connecting angles and the number of connected beams were investigated under monotonic and cyclic loading. The results indicated that all models were able to withstand 0.04 rotation without undergoing a significant decrease in the resisting moment which demonstrates the high ductility of this connection.