Development of Precast Lightweight Foamed Concrete Sandwich Panel
(PLFP) With Double Shear Truss Connector: An Overview
W. I. Goh
1
, N. Mohamad
2
and R. Abdullah
3
1,2
Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Batu
Pahat,Johor,Malaysia.
3
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor Malaysia.
a
hf110135@siswa.uthm.edu.my,
b
noridah@uthm.edu.my,
c
redzuan@utm.my
Keywords: Precast Lightweight Foamed Concrete Sandwich Panel, Structural behaviours,
Industrialized Building System
Abstract. Urbanization in many cities needs to adopt modern and innovative techniques in the
construction industry to balance the supply and demand in housing issues. To address the issue,
there is a need to look for alternative solutions and provide affordable quality housing. Therefore,
innovative construction method such as Industrialized Building System (IBS) needs to be adopted
to move away from conventional building construction technique in order to meet the demand.
Precast Sandwich panel is one of the alternative IBS that could meet and fulfil this target. Previous
research had shown that this panel had a potential to provide possible solution to housing problems
especially in low and medium cost housing sector. This paper presents findings from previous
research in this field especially on the panel's materials properties, structural behaviours and
empirical expression to determine its ultimate load carrying capacity. It is hoped the overview on
this topic could be used as guidance for future research on developing a lightweight sandwich panel
system in low to medium rise building.
Introduction
Recently, building construction industry is focusing on the usage of lightweight materials and IBS
to produce structural elements with high strength over weight ratio and to provide fast and
economical construction method. PLFP is one type of precast systems developed to be used as a
load bearing wall system for low rise building and is lighter compared to other sandwich panel [1].
PLFP has three layers comprising of two layers of lightweight foam concrete as wythes and
polystyrene core as insulation layer. Previous research focused on the structural behaviour PLFP
with single shear truss connector. The foamed concrete was designed to have a compressive
strength of 16 N/mm
2
to 17 N/mm
2
. The applied axial load was not to be taken by the wythes alone
because steel shear connectors was installed in the core and tied up to the steel reinforcement in the
wythes. The shear connectors managed to sustain the load and transfer it from one wythe to the
other. By this way, the whole structure acted as a single unit and therefore achieves higher stability
[2].
Material Properties
Sandwich panels are made from various materials while many of researchers used different
materials for wythe and core to identify its structural properties. These included foam concrete,
steel, timber, insulation materials and others.
Foam Concrete. Foam concrete is a lightweight material consisting of Portland cement paste or
cement filler matrix (mortar) with a homogeneous void or pore structure created by introducing air
in the form of small bubbles. By proper control in dosage of foam, a wide range of densities
(1600kg/m
3
to 400kg/m
3
) of foamed concrete can be obtained for application in structural, partition,
insulation and filling grades [3].
Advanced Materials Research Vol. 701 (2013) pp 280-285
Online available since 2013/May/27 at www.scientific.net
© (2013) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland
doi:10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.701.280
All rights reserved. No part of contents of this paper may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of TTP,
www.ttp.net. (ID: 161.139.220.112, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia UTM, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia-18/12/14,06:35:49)