THE FLEXURAL PERFORMANCE OF LIGHTWEIGHT FOAMED PRECAST CONCRETE SLABS: EXPERIMENTAL AND ANALYSIS

Abstract

Building the world need a reliable but light materials. But the development of lightweight concrete by optimizing its constituent limited to material research terms and on the contrary structural research using this material is very limited. In this paper, lightweight concrete slabs and their capacity for flexural loads is proposed and studied. The framework methodology used is performed flexural test experiments of full-scale slabs under 4-point bending, and software modeling will simply verify their results. Based on the deflection results, the maximum deflection of the lightweight concrete slab is found optimum at dimension of 0,5m width and 0.12m depth, which its average is 34.67 mm. The closest element model was solid element that resulted in 37.08 mm which meet the 34.67 mm by test. And more practical run is found for beam element and also plate element as well, which exhibit more appropriate analysis of 31,64 mm deflection for both models, which is also not far from the 34.67 mm by test. Therefore, beam element is accurate enough for sake of simplicity, the solid element more accurate but tends to suffer from time consuming problem or costly both for modeling and running. Finally, the lightweight foamed precast concrete slabs have a good flexural performance and in the future can be a good structural slab for precast construction.