Metal Additive Manufacturing of Seismic Fuses for Concentric Braced Frames Based on Plate Shear Deformation

This paper introduces a novel metal additively manufactured shear-based fuse (S-fuse) within a damage-controlled bracing (DCB) system to enhance seismic energy dissipation and structural resilience. The S-fuse localizes inelastic deformation in designated plates, protecting all other structural components and ensuring symmetric, stable, and repeatable hysteretic response in both tension and compression loading. Integrated into a hybrid brace with a hot-rolled section, the S-fuse offers key advantages: concentrating axial tension and compression damage within the fuse through shear yielding, enabling repairability by replacement, preserving symmetric hysteresis, and maximizing energy dissipation. The paper presents a numerical analysis of the S-fuse and provides a comparison with previously developed additively manufactured fuses. The results show that the S-fuse achieved comparable ultimate tensile strength, superior compression resistance due to shear yielding instead of buckling, and remarkably higher energy dissipation in cyclic loading, outperforming the double funnel and cylindrical designs by 2.75 and 3.65 times, respectively.