City Research Online

Abstract

This paper presents the bending behaviour of a partially encased ultra-shallow floor beam (USFB) with two types of lightweight concrete. The beam was fabricated by welding two asymmetric Tees together along the web to create a beam with multiple circular openings that act as ‘plug shear connectors’ with the concrete encasement. The bending resistance of the plug-shear connection system was obtained by testing a composite USFB for a beam span of 7.2 m, half of the span being made with a lightweight concrete slab and the other half span with an ultra-lightweight concrete slab. Analysis of the four-point bending tests was carried out to determine the increase in bending resistance due to composite action and the contribution of the longitudinal shear connection due to the concrete plug passing through the web openings combined with additional tie bars. Calculations of the properties of the USFB with the two types of lightweight concrete were made according to SCI documentation and Eurocode 4. It was observed that the deflections were predicted accurately by the elastic properties and that the failure mode was by concrete crushing before the plastic bending resistance of the composite section had been developed. It was also shown that the cracked section properties should be used for the deflection analysis.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	Composite beams; lightweight concrete slab; ultra-shallow flooring system; flexural test; ultra-lightweight concrete; flooring system
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) T Technology > TH Building construction
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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