Study On The Behavior Of Recycled Aggregate Concrete Columns Under Static Loading

Recent years, many researchers have studied the reuse of waste building materials, but most of them mainly investigated on the basic mechanics performances of the concrete with recycled coarse aggregate. The column is one of the most important bearing members. The behavior of recycled aggregate columns should be studied, so that they will be applied in civil engineering in the future.In this paper, the experiments of ten recycled aggregate concrete columns and four normal aggregate columns are made, concrete strength, slenderness and eccentricity of the applied axial load are considered. Failure modes, deflections and loading capacities are investigated. The following conclusions are obtained:(1) The failure modes and mechanics of recycled aggregate concrete columns are similar to that of the failure modes of normal aggregate concrete columns.(2) The influence of the three parameters on recycled aggregate concrete columns is similar to the normal aggregate concrete columns. The lateral stiffness of recycled aggregate concrete columns is larger than that of normal aggregate concrete columns.(3) Based on the analysis of experiment results, it is proved that it is feasible to apply the design standard for the normal aggregate concrete columns to the loading capacity calculation of recycled aggregate concrete columns. But the loading capacities of the columns subjected to eccentric loading should be multiplied by the factor 0.9.In this paper, the nonlinear finite element analysis of the columns is presented; the results of the finite element analysis are well agreement with that of the experiments.