ANALYSIS OF REINFORCED CONCRETE HOLLOW PIERS BEHAVIOR: BENEFITS OF FRP CONFINEMENT

Reliable stress-strain behavior of concrete is necessary particularly when a member is subjected to combine bending and axial load and confinement effects should be accounted for. A unified theory for confinement of circular hollow sections is proposed herein, that can be extended to the case of solid and noncircular sections. The main aim of the model is to trace step-by-step the evolution of the three dimensional stresses in confined concrete and confining devices (i.e. FRP externally bonded jackets). The iterative model is able to estimate confinement effectiveness and to plot stress-strain relationships, which are different in the case of solid and hollow sections. Through the proposed improved model, a simplified closed form solution has been also derived to directly determine ultimate confined concrete properties and stress-strain curves. At present, theoretical results based on the proposed concrete circular hollow sections confinement model, in satisfactory agreement with the experimental data available in scientific literature, show that FRP jacketing can enhance the ultimate load and ductility significantly, also in the case of hollow concrete cross sections.