Abstract

Concrete encased with trapezoidally corrugated web profiled cold-formed steel beams are used worldwide to improve resistance toward fire and corrosion, higher load carrying capacity as well as significant increase in the bending stiffness by encasing concrete on the beam portion. The present work gives a detailed description on the experimental, analytical and numerical investigation on the flexural behavior of concrete encased trapezoidally corrugated web profiled cold-formed steel beams which were simply supported at both ends and subjected to two point symmetric loading. The flexural behavior of such structure has been experimentally tested to failure under pure bending. To find the effect of concrete encasement in the web, 12 experiments were conducted by two different series. Beams having three different web corrugation angles of 0°, 30°, and 45° with two different web depth-thickness ( / ) ratios of 60 and 80 were tested. Experimental results such as load-deflection relationship, ultimate capacity, load-strain relationship, moment-curvature curves, ductility and failure mode indices of the specimens are presented. From the static bending tests the concrete encased trapezoidally corrugated web beam showed improved moment carrying capacity, ductility behavior and the resistance to transverse deflections in comparison to concrete encased with plain web beam. Especially for the beams with concrete encased 30° trapezoidally corrugated web having ( / ) ratio 60 and 80, the loading capacity was improved about 54% and 67.3% and the ductility also increased about 1.6 and 3.6 times, when compared to concrete encased beams with plain web. This research should contribute to the future engineering applications on seismic resistant structures and efficient usage of concrete encased with cold-formed steel beams by exhibiting its super elasto-plastic property. The analytical and numerical results showed good agreement with the experimental results at yield load, which indicates that the proposed analytical equations can be applied in predicting flexural strength accurately for such concrete encased trapezoidally corrugated web profiled cold-formed steel beams.

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