Experimental Research And FEM Analysis On Axial Bearing Capacity Of Hat-section Steel Wall Column Wrapped With Foaming Concrete

Traditional light gauge steel is increasing and developing after being brought in China last century. In spite of its advantage, some problems appear nowadays. A new system named hat-section steel column wrapped with foaming concrete is proposed in the paper, aiming at overcoming the shortcomings of traditional system with its own advantages, and providing basis to application to engineering in reality.An axial compression experiment is provided for the hat-section steel column wrapped with foaming concrete. Material tests of foaming concrete and hat-section steel are conducted to obtain mechanical behavior and constitution relationship. There are 18 specimens including three kinds of foaming concrete with different strength and six kinds of hat-section columns with different thickness. In the process of testing, bearing capacity, axial and horizontal displacements, strains in mid-column and failure modes are recording. The testing results are compared with the hat-section skeleton test so that the mechanical behavior of the members can be obtained.Based on the test, FEM models are made for hat-section steel column with foaming concrete to simulate and analyze using ABAQUS program. The parts of foaming concrete, hat-section steel and support connectors are simulated and assembled according to the test specimens. The results of FEM models are obtained with the practical methods. The correctness of the FEM models are verified through the comparisons of mechanical behavior and failure modes( including hat-section steel and foaming concrete) between tests and FEM.With the verified FEM models, the ultimate load influence factors of hat-section column wrapped with foaming concrete are analyzed including strength grade of foaming concrete, thickness of hat-section steel, exposed length of steel and web with circle openings of hat-section steel. The influence degree and weight of every factor are summed up. The simplified methods of ultimate loads of the columns are concluded with the different influence factors which can lay the foundation for applications in engineering.