Lateral impact behaviour of concrete-filled steel tubes with localised pitting corrosion

Steel corrosion induces structural deterioration of concrete-filled steel tubes (CFSTs), and any potential extreme action on a corroded CFST would pose a severe threat. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation on the lateral impact behaviour of CFSTs suffering from localised pitting corrosion damage. A refined finite element analysis model is developed for the simulation of locally corroded CFSTs subjected to lateral impact loads, which takes into account the strain rate effects on concrete and steel materials as well as the random nature of corrosion pits, i.e., the distribution patterns and the geometric characteristics. Full-range nonlinear analysis on the lateral impact behaviour in terms of loading and deforming time-history relations, nonlinear material stresses, composite actions, and energy dissipations are presented for CFSTs with no corrosion, uniform corrosion and pitting corrosion, respectively. Localised pitting corrosion is found to pose a more severe deterioration on the lateral impact behaviour of CFSTs due to the plastic deformation concentration, the weakened confinement and the reduction in energy absorption capacity of the steel tube. An extended parametric study is then carried out to identify the influence of the key parameters on the lateral impact behaviour of CFSTs with localised pitting corrosion. Finally, simplified design methods considering the features of pitting corrosion are proposed to predict the dynamic flexural capacity of locally pitted CFSTs subjected to lateral impact loads, and reasonable accuracy is obtained.