Study and investigation of stainless steel - lightweight concrete - stainless steel composite wall

Abstract

This project seeks to design and create a sustainable sandwich construction with a lightweight concrete core built from coal waste spheres, stainless-steel rigid face and shear studs embedded into the concrete to enable the combined action of the concrete foam and the stainless-steel profile to improve the fatigue strength through experimental, numerical and FEM studies. The main objective of this research is to study and investigate a composite wall consisting of stainless-steel face plates, concrete foam and shear studs to contribute to understanding of the behavior of the shear connector in the lightweight concrete and the stainless-steel face plates. This study intends to investigate and compare the mechanical properties of lean duplex stainless steel grades 2001, austenitic stainless-steel grades 304D, and grade 304 to mild steel for the face plate of the composite wall. In addition, to the three grades of stainless steel, ten lightweight concrete mixes are studied, designed and casted to achieve the floatable density of the concrete, the mixes are further investigated based on the filler diameter, kind, and percentage of fibre content for the foam of the composite structure. Various researchers' investigation on composite walls are studied and in-depth analysis is done on the axial loading and equations are proposed. American Standards AISC360, Korean Standards KEPIC-SNG and Japanese Standards JEAG 4618 are extensively studied, and suggestions are made on the validity of the standards. A three-dimensional finite element model of the axial loading test is developed using the general-purpose finite element program ABAQUS and the load test is analyzed using different concrete material models, and analysis procedures. To assess the accuracy and reliability of the developed finite element model, it is validated against steel - concrete - steel composite walls modelled by researcher. The results obtained from the finite element analysis showed excellent agreement with the experimental studies proving that the stainless-steel concrete steel depicted larger axial load bearing capacity in comparison to steel concrete steel composite wall. The results of the parametric study are evaluated, and findings are used to propose the design equations for shear connector resistance considering the position of the shear stud and thickness of the profiled sheeting. The coefficient of correlation between experimental and predicted results is nearly equal to one, which indicates that the predicted results are accurate, and the proposed equations are suitable for future predictions.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English