Strain efficiency of FRP jackets in FRP-confined concrete-filled circular steel tubes

The confinement of concrete columns using fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) jackets or wraps is a popular structural retrofitting technique. More recently, the benefits of FRP confinement of concrete-filled steel tubes have also been explored by researchers. Failure of such FRP-confined concrete-filled steel tubes is usually governed by the rupture of the FRP jacket in the hoop direction. However, the observed FRP hoop strain at failure (i.e. the hoop rupture strain) is typically lower than the ultimate tensile strain from a flat coupon test. Many factors may contribute to this phenomenon, one of which is the geometrical discontinuities at both the starting and finishing ends of the wrapping process commonly used to form an FRP jacket. This paper examines the effect of these geometrical discontinuities on the hoop rupture strain of FRP jackets in FRP-confined concrete-filled circular steel tubes. Detailed finite element (FE) analyses conducted using both linear elastic and elastic-perfectly plastic adhesive constitutive models are presented. Comparison between the FE predictions and available test results shows that the hoop rupture strains of FRP jackets predicted by FE analysis using an elastic-perfectly plastic adhesive model are in reasonable agreement with the test results. The influence of parameters such as the FRP thickness, FRP orthotropy, FRP elastic modulus, adhesive yield strength, adhesive thickness, and column size are examined.