Axial buckling behavior of H-piles considering mechanical-electrochemical interaction induced damage

Abstract

In this study, the buckling behavior of axial compressed H-shape column with time-variant corrosion defects was assessed. A simplified numerical simulation method able to consider the mechanical-electrochemical interaction during corrosion was proposed, the corrosion process was governed by a stress-corrosion (SC) model, which was embedded into ABAQUS by a user defined UMESHMOTION subroutine. Based on the user defined FORTRAN subroutine, both general corrosion, random corrosion and the stress-acceleration effect can be considered. By applying such numerical method, the time-variant corrosion morphology and collapse force of H-shape column under axial compression can be obtained. Such method avoids the disadvantage of conventional method, where the damage form and size are presupposed and history-independent. Moreover, a reverse structural design method was proposed, where the optimized original shape and dimension of the structure can be determined based on the allowable final state, service load and service life.