The recent 1994 Northridge and 1995 Hyogo-Ken earthquakes made the structural engineers to look for an alternate connection type to the fully welded connections, which failed to perform miserably under the nature’s seismic forces. This quest for an alternate connection type led the structural engineers to revisit the “Partially Restrained Connections (PRC)”, which exhibit sufficient ductility to dissipate the earthquake forces. Top and Seat Angle connection is one among the many PRC’s widely accepted and researched. The present study focuses on the various currently available prying models used to predict the capacity of angle connections. These include the prying model adopted by AISC design code (2005), the prying model used in Eurocode (2003), and Modified Struik Model by Swanson (2002). A comparison study is carried out to arrive at the prying model that predicts the capacity of the connection close to that obtained by performing a physical test on it and modification to the prying models is recommended to better the prediction of the capacity for a given angle connection.
The experimental results on Top and Seat Angle connections reported by Abolmaali (1999) have been used in this study. In addition to the available experimental information on the Top and Seat Angle connections, static finite element analysis was performed on candidate selected angle connection configurations. This additional information on the connection behavior from the finite element analysis helped in substantiating the comparison study. Parameters defining the connection geometry were chosen and the test cases for performing the finite element analysis were formulated by looking at the different possible combinations of these geometric parameters, while taking into consideration the currently accepted design and fabrication requirements. A finite element software package ANSYS (6.1) was used to perform the finite element analysis on the connections.