Precast Concrete Sandwich Panels for Mass Housing Systems: Plan and Design Strength Requirements

Abstract

Ambitious mission mode project ‘Affordable Housing for All’ proposed by the Government of India requires an innovative technology for speedy construction of cost-effective residential housing systems. Precast concrete sandwich panels with reinforced concrete wythes, expanded polystyrene core and truss shear connectors can be considered as a suitable alternative to conventional brick masonry walls and reinforced concrete floors. In this paper, a typical plan for mass housing systems is arrived and concrete sandwich panels are proposed to be used in the mass housing systems. In the proposed housing plan, the dimension of each room was selected based on length and width of the concrete sandwich panels (achieving dimensional co-ordination). The design strength of concrete sandwich panels is obtained from the experimental studies available in the literature and compared with actual loading effects on the mass housing system with the proposed plan. The study shows that concrete sandwich panels can be used for acting as load bearing walls and floors in housing systems. The study also indicates that dead weight of the housing systems could be reduced significantly by using concrete sandwich panels. Further experimental and analytical studies are required for assessing the structural behavior of the housing systems with concrete sandwich panels under lateral loads.