Behavior of cold-formed ferrocement composite column under axial loading

Abstract

In recent years, cold-formed steel sections have been used extensively in residential, industrial and commercial buildings as primary load-bearing structural components. This is because cold-formed steel sections are a high strength to weight ratio as compared to thicker hot-rolled steel sections, and their manufacturing process is simple and cost-effective. Currently, there are not many studies on cold-formed ferrocement composite due to the thin-walled nature of cold-formed. Hence, cold-formed members are susceptible to various buckling modes including local and distortional buckling and their ultimate strength behavior is governed by these buckling modes. Due to that, this research was aimed to contribute in solving the problem of buckling failure by introducing a composite action with ferrocement. Three numbers of composite columns with different cold formed size were cast and tested until failure. This re-search composed of two phases, experimental and analytical for validation; hence, the composite comparison shown an acceptable difference. The results of non-composite samples shown that cold-formed is susceptible to these three failures, distortion, local buck-ling, and flexural buckling. However, the provision of the ferrocement which made it composite has arrested the column from having a clear maximum flexural buckling failure, the composite samples test results indicated that the composite of h100 has a better load resistant compared to h75 composite samples with the difference of 212kN. It also showed that the ultimate load of the experimental satisfied the rules of the analytical BS.