Performance of fire damaged steel reinforced high strength concrete (SRHSC) columns

In this study, an experimental study is performed to understand the effect of spalling on the structural behavior of fire damaged steel reinforced high strength concrete (SRHSC) columns, and the test results of temperature distributions and the displacements at elevated temperature are analyzed. Toward this goal, three long columns are tested to investigate the effect of various test parameters on structural behavior during the fire, and twelve short columns are tested to investigate residual strength and stiffness after the fire. The test parameters are mixture ratios of polypropylene fiber (0 and 0.1 vol.%), magnitudes of applied loads (concentric loads and eccentric loads), and the time period of exposure to fire (0, 30, 60 and 90 minutes). The experimental results show that there is significant effect of loading on the structural behaviors of columns under fire. The loaded concrete columns result more explosive spalling than the unloaded columns under fire. In particular, eccentrically loaded columns are severely spalled. The temperature distributions of the concrete are not affected by the loading state if there is no spalling. However, the loading state affects the temperature distributions when there is spalling occurred. In addition, it is found that polypropylene fiber prevents spalling of both loaded and unloaded columns under fire. From these experimental findings, an equation of predicting residual load capacity of the fire damaged column is proposed.