Structural behaviour of two-way fibre reinforced composite slabs

Structural behaviour of two-way fibre reinforced composite slabs

Innovative new flooring systems utilising lightweight fibre reinforced polymer composite materials may have the significant potential to offer both economic and performance benefits for infrastructure asset owners compared to conventional concrete and steel systems. Over recent years, a range of prototype floor systems using fibre reinforced polymer composites have been developed by researchers at the University of Southern Queensland. However before such structural systems can be widely adopted by industries, fundamental understanding of their behaviour must be improved. Such work will allow for the development of new design and analysis procedures which will enable engineers to efficiently and accurately design and analyse such structures. This dissertation presents an investigation into a new two-way fibre reinforced composite floor slab system. The proposed new two-way slab system is, in essence, a sandwich structure with an innovative hollow core made from a castable particulate filled resin system. The key focus of this dissertation is the development of a new analysis tool to analyse the two-way fibre reinforced composite slab and facilitate subsequent parametric studies into slab configurations for concept refinement. The detailed 3D finite element analyses and experimental investigations are performed to verify the new analysis tool, and provide more detailed insight into the structural behaviour of this new two-way fibre reinforced composite slab. Comparisons with detailed 3D FEA and experiments illustrate that the simplified analysis tool is capable of providing sufficient accuracy for the preliminary analysis of a slab structure. Moreover, the 3D finite element analyses agree well with the experiments, and it is concluded that the behavioural responses of the proposed new slab structure can be reliably predicted. The experimental results show that this new slab concept exhibits quite a robust static behaviour and is likely to have a robust fatigue performance.