Experimental Study on Prefabricated Lightweight Composite Wall Panels under Flexural Loading

Abstract

 The prefabricated lightweight wall panels have been widely used instead of brick walls in the modern construction industry of building due to its many advantages. As lightweight concrete is week under flexural loading, more reinforcement bars are required to improve the flexural strength of conventional lightweight wall panel. In this paper, steel studs/angles are proposed instead of reinforcement bars because the moment of inertial of steel stud/angle is higher than reinforcement bars. Experimental study has been conducted to investigate the flexural behaviour of proposed prefabricated lightweight composite (PLC) wall panels. Three samples of PLC wall panels are fabricated using lightweight concrete materials and studs. The parameters that are changed in the test specimens are material types (cold-form steel or carbon steel) and numbers of steel studs/angles. The test results show that the material types and numbers of steel studs/angles has significant impact on the flexural strength and stiffness of PLC wall panels.