Cyclic behavior of Q345GJ steel used in energy dissipation shear links

The cyclic behavior of Q345GJ steel was explored by strain cycle tests, stress cycle tests and uniaxial tension tests. The results of strain cycle tests confirmed that Q345GJ steel has no cyclic hardening, and it had rare strain amplitude effect or strain history effect. The stress cycle tests confirmed that the cumulative plastic strain goes up stably under eccentric stress with increasing loading loops. Thus, it can be concluded that the hardening characteristics of Q345GJ coincide with kinematic hardening, having almost no isotropic hardening. The superposition of four nonlinear kinematic hardening model based on Chaboche’s constitutive model was used to predict the hardening characteristics of Q345GJ steel, and the parameters of the constitutive model were calibrated based on the test results. The numerical validation of the constitutive model confirmed that the proposed parameters can give good simulation for strain cycle behavior and stress cycle behavior of Q345GJ steel.