Thermal performance of steel and fibre reinforced concrete composite floor

Abstract

In general, steel and concrete composite floors tend to present a reduced functional performance (considering thermal and acoustic conditions), due to their low mass and to the high conductivity of the steel elements. By in-cluding components with high thermal insulation capacity in these structur-al systems, it is possible to maintain the structure lightness and not com-promise the thermal performance. Within this work, the analysis is dedicated to a composite floor in which a fibre reinforced concrete (FRC) slab is asso-ciated with a concrete filled “U” type steel profile. The fibre reinforcement avoids the use of conventional reinforcement, with significant savings in term of fabrication time. Filler blocks are inserted, composed by thermal in-sulation material (EPS), between the “U” shaped steel profiles, which act as formwork during the casting phase and, after the concrete hardening, con-tributing to improve the system´s thermal performance. This system was evaluated through numerical assessment. The analysis enabled to determine the thermal transmittance (U value) and to identify the critical zones in terms of thermal insulation efficiency. The performance of the proposed so-lution was also compared to other flooring solutions. According to the re-sults obtained, the proposed composite floor presents a better thermal behav-iour than other more traditional flooring systems.