Novel hybrid FRP-timber-concrete floor panel system

Timber-concrete composite (TCC) floor panels have gained wide acceptance in office and residential construction due to their lightweight, low cost, and low carbonfootprint. A typical TCC floor panel consists of a concrete layer as the compression element and a timber layer as the tensile reinforcement. However, in many of these TCC floor panels, part of the concrete layer may act in tension and thus reduce the overall efficiency of material usage. This paper presents a novel hybrid FRP-timber-concrete (FTC) floor panel system, which increases the efficiency of material usage by reducing the volume of tensile concrete. The proposed FTC panel system utilizes timber and concrete in tensile and compressive zones, respectively, and introduces an FRP-laminated-timber core as a mid-layer to reduce the volume of tensile concrete. The design conception, fabrication process and the test results of two FTC panels with corrugated core are presented in this paper. It is shown that the proposed FTC floor system can achieve higher load capacity per unit weight than the existing TCC floor panels. The load-displacement behavior also showed excellent ductility.