Behavior of steel tube and confined high strength concrete for concrete-filled RHS tubes

This paper presents an experimental study of the separated behavior of short (L/H=3) high strength concrete-filled rectangular hollow section (RHS) tubes concentrically loaded in compression to failure. A total of 50 specimens were tested. Experimental results showed that the concrete strength influenced the failure pattern of the specimen. The height-to-breadth ratio of the rectangular tube (varying from 1.0 to 1.6) had no evident influence on the ultimate bearing capacity of the specimen. Then based on the experimental results, a numerical separation method was successfully used to separate the compressive load carried by the steel tube and the core concrete. The equivalent One-Dimensional nonlinear stress-strain models of the steel and the confined concrete were suggested, which can be used to determine the overall behavior of the high strength concrete-filled RHS tubes. The stress-strain models have been used to numerically analyze the behavior of high strength concrete-filled RHS tubes. The numerical results are compared with the experimental results and they agreed well with each other.