Experimental Study on Flexural Behavior of RC–UHPC Slabs with EPS Lightweight Concrete Core

This paper presents an experimental investigation that focuses on the flexural behavior of an innovative reinforced concrete–ultra-high performance concrete slab with an expanded polystyrene lightweight concrete core. This type of slab is proposed to serve the semi-precast solution, in which the bottom layer is ultra-high performance concrete working as a formwork during the construction of semi-precast slab, the expanded polystyrene lightweight concrete layer is used for the reduction of structure self-weight, and the top layer is normal concrete designed to withstand compressive stress when the slab is loaded. Two similar large-scale specimens with dimensions of 6200 mm × 1000 mm × 210 mm were fabricated and tested under four-point bending conditions to investigate the flexural behavior of composite slab. Test results indicated that three different layers of materials can work effectively together without separation. The bottom ultra-high performance concrete layer leads to the high ductility of the slab and has a good effect in limiting the widening of the crack width by forming other cracks. According to design code ACI 544.4R, a modified distribution stress diagram on the composite section was proposed and proven to be suitable for the prediction of flexural strength of the composite section with an error of 3.4% compared to the experimental result. The effect of the ultra-high performance concrete layer on the flexural strength of the composite slab was clearly demonstrated, and for the case in this study, the ultra-high performance concrete layer improves the flexural strength of the slab by about 11.5%.

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