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Lightweight modular construction has become an increasing need to meet the housing requirements around the world today. The benefits of modular construction ranging from rapid production, consistency in quality, sustainability, and ease of use have widened the scope for the construction of residential, commercial, and even emergency preparedness facilities. This study introduces novel floor panels that can be flat-packed and built into modular housing components on-site with minimal labour and assistance. The flooring system uses hollow cellular panels made of various configurations of trapezoidal steel sheets. The structural performance of three different configurations of these hollow flooring systems as a modular component is presented in this study by analysing the failure modes, load-displacement parameters, and strain behaviour. The study confirms significant advantages of the proposed hollow floor systems, with multi-cells reporting higher load-carrying capacity. The hollow flooring system performed well in terms of structural performance and ease in fabrication as opposed to the conventional formworks and commercial temporary flooring systems. The proposed flooring system promises efficient application as working platforms or formworks in temporary infrastructural facilities and emergency construction activities.

A newly developed innovative steel–geopolymer concrete composite floor slab for use in modular construction is investigated in this study. We present experimental results on the flexural behaviour of eight modular sandwich composite floor slabs with different configurations containing self-compacting geopolymer concrete (SCGC) as infill and Basalt FRP (BFRP) bars as reinforcement. The use of sustainable infill material such as SCGC and non-corrosive BFRP in the proposed composite floor slabs is beneficial from the perspective of environmental sustainability. This study also compares the performance of these composite floor slabs against their hollow counterparts. The overlap between the cells in multi-cell panels acts as additional partitioning walls. The infill material offers the sandwich composite floor slabs significant advantages by improving their load-carrying capacity. A critical analysis of the composite floor slabs for load displacement, failure modes, and strain behaviour is also conducted. The study concludes that the sandwich panels with multiple smaller cells and infill materials exhibit a sound structural performance, reporting a 6–8 times higher load-carrying capacity than their hollow counterparts. A comparison of hollow and infilled panels shows that the infill sandwich panels are suitable as structural slabs. At the same time, the former is more suitable for temporary formworks, shelter, and pedestrian platform applications.

Trapezoidal-shaped thin-walled metallic profiled sheets are used in composite floor construction to enable rapid construction and reduce reinforcement and formwork requirements in concrete casting. However, relevant literature reported the early failure of steel sections due to the buckling and shear of existing trapezoidal and re-entrant decking profiles. There are also limitations regarding design rules for composite flooring systems. Current work aims to develop a new type of composite top-hat section for possible use in composite slim-floor construction. Sinusoidal metallic corrugated sheets that are widely used in building construction were utilized and a new bending technique was used to produce deck components, in which transverse corrugations were introduced along the main direction of the corrugated profile. This paper investigates the structural response of these new sections for several loading and support conditions using a pilot experimental scheme. The developed top-hat sections demonstrated considerable resistance to bending as well as buckling through effective stress re-distributions under considered construction stage loading for single span and continuous span conditions. Currently available design equations recommended by Australian Standards for a similar type of corrugated decks were used to predict the design strength and to compare it with those obtained experimentally. It was concluded that the expressions proposed by the code were inadequate for single span loading cases and would require modifications before being applied to the new profile.