Abstract
The prefabricated lightweight wall panels have been widely used instead of brick walls in the modern construction industry of building due to its many advantages. As lightweight concrete is week under flexural loading, more reinforcement bars are required to improve the flexural strength of conventional lightweight wall panel. In this paper, steel studs/angles are proposed instead of reinforcement bars because the moment of inertial of steel stud/angle is higher than reinforcement bars. Experimental study has been conducted to investigate the flexural behaviour of proposed prefabricated lightweight composite (PLC) wall panels. Three samples of PLC wall panels are fabricated using lightweight concrete materials and studs. The parameters that are changed in the test specimens are material types (cold-form steel or carbon steel) and numbers of steel studs/angles. The test results show that the material types and numbers of steel studs/angles has significant impact on the flexural strength and stiffness of PLC wall panels.
Highlights
The prefabricated lightweight wall panels have been widely used in the modern building construction industry instead of the brick walls due to the drawback of brickwork [1]
This paper investigates the composite behaviour of prefabricated lightweight composite (PLC) wall panels under flexural loading for different numbers of steel studs/angles and material types
It can be concluded that both wall panels have enough deformation ability and showed good ductility, but, in term of initial flexural stiffness and flexural strength, the PLC-WP2 wall panel is better than the PLC-WP1 wall panel
Summary
The prefabricated lightweight wall panels have been widely used in the modern building construction industry instead of the brick walls due to the drawback of brickwork [1]. The lightweight composite wall panels, instead of conventional lightweight wall panels incorporated reinforced bars, are developed using foam concrete and cold-formed steels [12,13,14]. The benefit of composite steel studs with gypsum plasterboards are investigated experimentally and numerically, limited research has been conducted on the steel studs with lightweight concrete to make the prefabricated lightweight composite (PLC) wall panels. This paper investigates the composite behaviour of PLC wall panels under flexural loading for different numbers of steel studs/angles and material types. Steel studs/angles are proposed instead of reinforcement bars because the moment of inertial of steel stud/angle is higher than reinforcement bars, which will enhance the flexural strength of prefabricated lightweight wall panel. The failure mode, ultimate load capacity, initial stiffness and load-deformation curves of proposed PLC wall panels are mainly discussed in this paper
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