Experimental and numerical investigation on post-earthquake fire behaviour of the circular concrete-filled steel tube columns

Post-earthquake fire is a common disaster which causes serious safety issues to infrastructures. This study aims to investigate the residual loading capacities of circular concrete-filled steel tube (CFST) columns under post-earthquake fire experimentally and numerically. The experimental programme contains two loading steps - pre-damage cyclic loading at room temperature and transient state tests with constant compression loads. Three finite element models are developed and validated against the test results. Upon validation, a total of 48 numerical results were generated in the parametric study to investigate the effects of thickness and strengths of steel tube, axial compression ratio and damage degree on the fire resistance of circular CFST columns. Based on the analysis on experimental and numerical results, the loading mechanism of circular CFST columns is discussed. A design method is proposed for the prediction of fire resistance time under different seismic pre-damage and compression loads. The predictions by the new method is compared with the newly generated experimental and numerical results and is found to be accurate and consistent with the mean value close to the unity and a coefficient of variation around 1%.