Abstracto

Strengthening of Concrete Filled Steel Tubular Columns using FRP Composites

P.Kiruthika, S Balasubramanian, MC Sundarraja, J Jegan

Over the past few decades, concrete filled steel tubular (CFST) column plays an eminent role in the construction industry owing to its structural behaviour like large deformation and energy absorption capacity. But these members get deteriorated due to the environmental effects like corrosion and ageing. The external strengthening of using fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) material is emerging as a new trend in enhancing the structural performance of CFST members to counteract the drawbacks in using the past rehabilitation work. In this paper, an experimental investigation has been carried out to investigate the behaviour of FRP strengthened slender circular CFST members under compression. The size of the specimens includes 42.4mm diameter, 3.2mm thickness and 1500mm height. In the experimental work, three columns are externally bonded by 200mm width of CFRP strips with the spacing of 60mm and another three columns with 300mm width and 100mm spacing. Experiments are undertaken to examine the interaction of FRP with CFST columns in terms of the failure modes, axial load Vs lateral deformation and enhancement in load carrying capacity. At the end, the results demonstrated that there is an improvement in the behaviour and the load carrying capacity of CFST columns by strengthening those externally using FRP composites.