Abstract
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Unlike residential and commercial buildings, a more effective and rational approach to preventing progressive collapse in storage racks is to sacrifice the bay where a local failure initiates. The cost of a confined collapse of one bay is insignificant compared to the cost of a progressive collapse. This paper investigates the use of fuse connectors between the portal beams and the uprights of typical drive-in steel storage racks for preventing a local collapse in a bay from propagating to adjacent bays. Through nonlinear dynamic analysis, it identifies the topology and conditions where fuse connectors may be effective.