Flexural Behaviors of Concrete/EPS-Foam/Glass-Fiber Composite Sandwich Panel

Composite structural insulated panels (CSIPs) have been developed for structural floor applications instead of traditional structural insulated panels (SIPs). However, the load bearing capacity of CSIPs is low due to the debonding between the top face sheet and the core when they are used for floors. To overcome this drawback, an improved composite structural insulated panel (ICSIP) was proposed and analyzed in this paper. In ICSIPs, a thick layer of concrete is used as the top face sheet instead of glass-fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) in CSIPs to increase the stiffness of the top compression face sheet. However, the bottom GFRP face sheet and EPS cores in CSIPs are preserved to reduce the weight of the structure and act as a template for the top concrete panels. Full-scale experimental testing and finite-element analysis were conducted to predict the flexural strength and deflection of the ICSIP floor member. Good agreement has been observed between the numerical results and experimental response up to the failure. The cause of failure of ICSIPs is the crushing of concrete face sheet rather than debonding. Moreover, the calculation formula for the ultimate bearing load and deflection was also developed based on the classical sandwich theory. The theoretical predictions reflect well the linear flexural response of the ICSIPs, while deviate as the load increases up to failure due to the theory limitations.