Experimental Study Of The Influence Of Moisture Content On The Performance Of Reinforced Concrete Column

For many years, flood disaster has been a main factor posing great threat to people's lives and properties. As a result, it has become more and more important to improve the security of structures suffering from flood immerge. However, at present, studies and experiments on performance variations of reinforced concrete are pretty scarce. Therefore, the present thesis studies the performance variation of reinforced concrete column due to moisture content change after being immerged in water based on experiments.At first, research results about performance of reinforced concrete column are summed up. And then, considering the impact of moisture content's change, a series of experiments on reinforces concrete columns were carried out. Based on the experiments, the variation law of natural vibration characteristics, hysteretic behavior and bearing capacity of reinforced concrete columns with the change of concrete moisture content is obtained, and the following conclusions are reached:(1) As moisture content increases, the natural vibration frequency of reinforced concrete columns increases as well. The variation is evident at early stage of immergence; however it will become stable as time passes. Although the damping ratios of immerged models become smaller than those of common ones, there exists a large increase after suffering from cyclic loads.(2) As moisture content increases, nearly no variation is observed for the hysteretic curves of column models, which means there is no rigidity degeneration caused by loading and unloading. The skeleton curve shows a decrease in peak load for immerged models.(3) At the early stage of immergence, the energy dissipation capacity of column model decreases a little bit. However, as time passes, it will increases to some extent.(4) Compared with common models, the horizontal bearing capacity and energy dissipation capacity of immerged ones gets smaller. However, as time passes, the bearing capacity first increases a little and then becomes stable, resulting to better ductility.