Structural behaviour of lightweight wall panel under axial load

Abstract

Precast components are nowadays widely used in the construction industry. Due to the increasing demand, the building sector need to continuously seeking for improvement in order to fulfill the industrialization in the building system. The structural behavior of lightweight foamed concrete wall panel with and without opening in term of ultimate load, lateral displacement, and failure mode were study. Two types of wall panel namely solid lightweight wall panel and lightweight wall panel with opening were designated as WP1 and WP2 respectively. The dimension of WP1 was 1500 mm high by 750 mm wide and 75 mm thick. Whilst the dimension of WP2 was 1000 mm high by 500 mm wide and 75 mm with wall surface opening of 240 mm x 240 mm at the center. Density of 1600 kg/m3 was considered for all wall panels. The panels were fixed at the bottom and pinned at the top of the wall and were tested due to axially load. The result shows the ultimate load of WP1 and WP2 were 755 kN and 361 kN respectively. All wall panels were buckle with single curvature of lateral displacement. In WP1 the maximum deflection were recorded at 0.7 of wall height with magnitude of 4.1 mm. However, in WP2, 8.2 mm of lateral displacement were recorded at 0.5 of wall height. The initial crack appeared at the lower portion of specimen WP1 after achieving 85 % (637 kN) of ultimate load and the samples was crushed and broke into four separated pieces when the ultimate load is reached because of the absent of reinforcement in the specimens. Whilst, in WP2 the first crack was appear at the top edge of opening after achieving 76 % (275 kN) of ultimate load.