Flexural behavior of sustainable reactive powder concrete bubbled slab flooring elements

Abstract

Voided slabs are reinforced concrete slabs in which voids allow to reduce the amount of concrete. The bubbled deck slab is a new and sustainable biaxial floor system to be used as a self-supporting concrete floor. The use of voided slabs leads to decrease the consumption of materials and improve the insulation properties for enhancing the objectives of sustainability. This study presents an investigation into the flexural behavior of sustainable Reactive Powder Concrete RPC bubbled slab flooring elements. Six one-way slabs were cast and tested up to the failure. The adopted variables in this study are: the volumetric ratio of steel fibers, type of slab; bubbled or solid, placing of reinforcement and thickness of slab. The effect of each variable on the ultimate load, deflection and strain has been discussed. The results show that increasing the percent of steel fibers from 1% to 2% in solid and bubbled slabs decreases the deflection by (18.75%) and (50%) respectively. As well as, the deflection increases by (41%) for bubbled slab compared to the solid slab. The slabs reinforced with top and bottom steel meshes show less deflection than slabs reinforced by only bottom steel mesh.

Behaviour of Reinforced Concrete Slabs with Embedded Polystyrene Spheres

“…High-density polyethylene (HDPE) [1,5,7,8] Plastic [9][10][11][12] Glass fiber plastic [3] Plastic/recycled plastic [9,13] Paper tube [14] Polypropylene plastic/recycled polypropylene [3,[23][24][25] Embedding lightweight materials in slabs Styropor / polystyrene [8,[15][16][17]21] Industrial sponge [18] Lightweight materials come in various shapes (Table 2), often larger than aggregate in concrete [17]. The most common shape is spherical.…”

The Effect of Voids on Flexural Capacity of Reinforced Concrete Slabs

“…The other technique to reduce the weight is to create intentional voids in the cross-section of the slabs. Several void shapes; donut [18][19][20], spherical [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], cuboid [1 and 28-31], ellipsoidal [27,32,33], flat void [21] etc. were used and several configurations (discrete void, continuous void etc.)…”

“…The voids may either be filled with a lightweight material namely polystyrene foam [23,34,35,36] which is common in slab constructions or left unfilled. If the void was not filled, then the void former may be manufactured using a lightweight material like plastic, recycled plastic (polyethylene high-density, PE-HD or polypropylene, PP) [19,21,22,24] or cardboard [37].…”

Experimental Study on Voided Slab Subjected to Flexural Load

“…As concrete weight constitutes a large portion of permanent load in a RC structure, it would be economical if the weight of the slab could be reduced. For that, studies were carried out to reduce the weight of concrete slab [2].…”