Experimental investigation on the bamboo-concrete filled circular steel tubular stub columns

Concrete-filled steel tubes have been widely used all over the world due to their superior structural behaviour. To promote the use of ecofriendly materials and to reduce the use of concrete, this paper presents an innovative type of composite column, which can be referred as bamboo-concrete filled steel tubes. In this kind of column, concrete filled in the space between the external steel tube and the inner raw moso bamboo. Bamboo-concrete filled steel tubes inherit the merits of concrete-filled steel tubes such as high load-bearing capacity and ductility performance. Besides, global buckling behaviour of a bamboo column due to its relatively large slenderness can be significantly improved, and the bamboo column with nodes could provide confinement to the infilled concrete. This paper investigated the composite effect of bamboo-concrete filled steel tubular stub columns subjected to axial compression. In addition, concrete-filled double-skin steel tubular stub columns and hollow concrete-filled steel tubular stub columns were also tested for comparison. The main experimental parameter considered was the diameter-to-thickness ratio (D/t) of steel tube. Test results indicated that the composite columns with moso bamboo pipe as inner core elements showed better ductility than the hollow concrete-filled steel tubular stub columns. The bearing capacity and ductility visibly increased with decreasing of the D/t ratio.