The inherent difficulties
with the hot rolled open steel sections as structural elements have forced the
researchers to develop some alternative sectional forms to overcome these. Thin
walled closed form sections are the outcome of the same. The major difficulty with
the thin walled sections is the local buckling of the plate elements. Use of
concrete as infill material for the hollow sections may overcome the difficulty
of local buckling to some extent. In the concrete filled sections, there is a
mutual enhancement of properties, because the steel plate provides confinement
for the concrete, which in turn prevents the inward buckling of the plate. This
paper presents an experimental study on concrete filled circular, rectangular
and square column members. Also a theoretical study using finite element
technique is presented for the analysis of filled circular columns. Results
show that the filled sections are much more efficient than equivalent hollow or
concrete sections.