Fire resistance of stiffened CFDST columns after earthquake-induced damages

Abstract

Abstract Despite the awareness about the hazard gained through the past evidence, fire following an earthquake remains a predominant agent of damage to buildings and life-line structures. Often the damage caused by the subsequent fire can be more severe than the damage caused by the ground motion itself. Concrete filled double skin tube (CFDST) columns as a special composite structure are particularly prone to the inadequate steel-concrete interface bonding and subsequent local buckling during separate fire conditions and seismic action. To establish a favorable interface interaction between steel and concrete as well as to postpone overall buckling under post-earthquake fire, the effectiveness of stiffening CFDST columns with longitudinal steel stiffeners are investigated. The analyses on CFDST columns with different patterns of stiffeners embedded in the interior or exterior surfaces of the inner or outer tubes are conducted with a sequentially coupled approach, starting with a heat transfer analysis and followed by a stress/deformation solution. In the finite element modeling, the confinement provided by both the inner and outer tubes on the compressive strength of concrete is accounted for. The effect of concrete fracture is incorporated by inserting a horizontal discrete crack model at the location of the major tensile crack. The results showed that stiffeners on the exterior surface of the inner tubes are among the most effective of various patterns studied in enhancing the fire endurance of the columns up to 64%. For stiffened CFDST columns contrary to the unstiffened ones, the fire-resistance reduction to seismic damage is usually less than 5% of the initial value. The fire-resistance rating reduction obtained for hollow ratios of 0.5 is 58%, with respect to the hollow ratio of 0.25.