STUDY OF SHEAR BEHAVIOR OF SANDWICH WALL PANEL

Abstract: This study was carried out to find the shear behavior of sandwich wall panels in both simply supported connection and in rigid connection. Sandwich panels has become a topic of interest among researchers in the recent years. Sandwich panels consists of Expanded Polystrene foam as core material with the thickness of 75 mm caged within the weld mesh. The dimension of the sandwich panels were 1000mm x 500mm x 130mm. The skin material used is standard concrete of grade M40 of thickness 25 mm. River sand of nominal size 2 mm is used as fine aggregate. Addition of GGBS improves the strength of concrete with the ratio of 30% GGBS and 60% concrete. Sandwich wall panels were casted individually and cured in ambient temperature. The sandwich wall panels were connected using high strength bolt of grade 8.8, thus a framed structure is formed. The compressive strength of concrete sandwich wall panel is 42.5Kn/m2. Glenium is used as superplasticzer to reduce the water percentage and also imparts high strength to concrete at early age. By using bolted connection the frame acts as simply supported, thus the end moments are restricted and it has the advantage to counter effect dynamic load. In rigid connection steel bar of 6mm diameter of 'W' shaped connection in used.These wall panels can be used as load bearing walls, partition walls, window panels and other shapes that provide attractive, functional and durable facade. These sandwich wall panels can be best alternative solution for the low cost energy efficient building.

Keywords: Expanded Polystyrene Foam, Shear Connector, Composite slab, Flexural behavior.