Behaviours of steel-fibre-reinforced ULCC slabs subject to concentrated loading

Novel steel fibre reinforced ultra-lightweight cement composite (ULCC) with compressive strength of 87.3MPa and density of 1649kg/m3 was developed for the flat slabs in civil buildings. This paper investigated structural behaviours of ULCC flat slabs according to a 4-specimen test program under concentrated loading and some reported test results. The investigated governing parameters on the structural behaviours of the ULCC slabs include volume fraction of the steel fibre and the patch loading area. The test results revealed that ULCC flat slabs with and without flexure reinforcement failed in different failure mode, and an increase in volume fraction of the steel fibre and loading area led to an increase in flexural resistance for the ULCC slabs without flexural reinforcement. Based on the experiment results, the analytical models were developed and also validated. The validations showed that the analytical models developed in this paper could predict the ultimate strength of the ULCC flat slabs with and without flexure reinforcement reasonably well.