Behaviour of circular concrete-filled lean duplex stainless steel-carbon steel tubular short columns

Recently, a concrete-filled austenitic stainless steel-carbon steel tubular column has been introduced as a new form of composite members. This column is composed of an external stainless steel tube and an internal concentrically placed carbon steel tube with concrete filling in the whole tubular section. However, the excellent performance of such composite columns can additionally be achieved by utilising the low-cost lean duplex stainless steel material. In this paper, the behaviour of circular concrete-filled lean duplex stainless steel-carbon steel tubular (CFSCT) short columns under axial loading is investigated by using the general purpose finite element analysis program ABAQUS. A new constitutive model for the concrete core confined by both the external stainless steel tube and the internal carbon steel tube is proposed and incorporated in the finite element model developed. The accurate two-stage stress-strain relationships are employed to model cold-formed lean duplex stainless steels. The finite element results obtained by the proposed concrete model are shown to be in good agreement with test results. Parametric studies are then conducted to investigate the effects of concrete compressive strength, carbon steel yield stress and cross-section geometry on the behaviour of CFSCT columns. The ACI code is found to significantly underestimate the ultimate axial strengths of CFSST columns. Therefore, a new design model is proposed for CFSCT short columns. It is shown that the proposed design model provides excellent predictions of the ultimate axial strengths of circular CFSCT columns over a wide range of diameter-to-thickness ratios of the stainless steel tubes.