Flexural behavior of continuous bubbled reinforced reactive powder concrete flat slab

Abstract EN

This paper presents an experimental investigation on flexural behavior of continuous bubbled reinforced Reactive Powder Concrete (RPC) flat slabs.

Bubbled slab is one of the various types of voided slabs.

It consist of bubbles placed inside a concrete slab which will reduce the self-weight of the structure by about 35% (Tina Lai 2009).

On the other hand, using RPC make it possible for structural member to have smaller dimensions due to the great strength of this type of concrete.

In this study these two method are used to increase the building spaces dimensions by reducing self-weigh of the structure by using bubbled slabs and to decrease the structural members' dimensions by using RPC have been investigated together.

To study the flexural behavior of continuous bubbled flat slabs such as the ultimate load carrying capacity, central deflection and slabs crack pattern at the ultimate load, seven types of slabs were tested.

The parameters of the study were type of concrete (RPC and Normal Concrete (NC)), bubbles diameter to slab thickness ratio (D/t) of (0.6 and 0.7), type of loading (distributed and line load) and solid slab.

The test results show that the crack pattern and ultimate load capacity as well as maximum deflection depends on all of the mentioned parameters, were by increasing (D/t) ratio the ultimate load capacity increases about (7.36%, 5.46% and 16.52%) for RPC slabs under distributed load, line load and NC slabs, respectively.

The solid slab increases the ultimate load about (4.05%) compare to bubbled slab.

Also, the line load decreases the ultimate load compare to distributed load by (3.45-5.16%) for different (D/t) ratio, and using the NC also decreases the ultimate load compare to RPC by (48-52.13%) for different (D/t) ratio.