Verification of the Structural Performance of Textile Reinforced Reactive Powder Concrete Sandwich Facade Elements

As a part of the SESBE (Smart Elements for Sustainable Building Envelopes) project, non-load bearing sandwich elements were developed with Textile Reinforced Reactive Powder Concrete (TRRPC) for outer and inner facings, Foam Concrete (FC) for the insulating core and Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) continuous connectors. The structural performance of the developed elements was verified at various levels by means of a thorough experimental program coupled with numerical analysis. Experiments were conducted on individual materials (i.e., tensile and compressive tests), composites (i.e., uniaxial tensile, flexural and pull-out tests), as well as components (i.e., local anchorage failure, shear, flexural and wind loading tests). The experimentally yielded material properties were used as input for the developed models to verify the findings of various component tests and to allow for further material development. In this paper, the component tests related to local anchorage failure and wind loading are presented and coupled to a structural model of the sandwich element. The validated structural model provided a greater understanding of the physical mechanisms governing the element’s structural behavior and its structural performance under various dead and wind load cases. Lastly, the performance of the sandwich elements, in terms of composite action, was shown to be greatly correlated to the properties of the GFRP connectors, such as stiffness and strength.