The two-way flexural performance of the PSSDB floor system with infill material

Abstract

This paper investigates the structural performance of the Profiled Steel Sheeting Dry Board (PSSDB) system; a lightweight composite structure which is made by binding a Profiled Steel Sheeting (PSS) to a Dry Board (DB) by mechanical screws. Many studies indicated that it can be used as flooring units. However, most of them focused on utilizing the system as a one-way floor panel. It's rare to find studies that consider the two-way position, and so far none has ever considered the effect of the infill material in that situation. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the flexural performance of the two-way PSSDB floor panel with the presence of the infill material. An Experimental (EXP) and Finite Element (FE) approaches were employed. For the EXP tests, it was found that applying a steel plate (SP) can enhance the stiffness and strength of the PSSDB system by approximately 31% and 15%. The results were used to compare with the ones of a previous study, and it was shown that applying infill material can improve the strength by 13.2%. Applying both Steel Plate (SP) and infill material instead of SP alone can enhance it by 13.6%. As for the FE approach, it was demonstrated that changing the thickness of the DB and SP has a minor effect by no more than 5%, while changing the PSS's thickness can affect the performance by up to 18.3%. And finally, the effect of changing the type of infill material is less than 1%.