Structural behaviour of wire fabric reinforced concrete load bearing wall panel subjected to axial load without eccentricity / Fandhy Rajin

Wire fabric reinforced concrete wall panel is a recent trend used in the construction of the high rise buildings in Malaysia. In this method, tunnel form system is used as a form work to construct the wall. Other than that, reinforcement that usually use normal bar are substituted by wire fabric thus leading to a higher speed installation and considerable financing saving. However, in the construction of wire fabric reinforced concrete wall, problems associated to wall-slab jointing and poor base level concrete compaction happened. As such, this research is conducted to investigate the structural performance of this wall through experimental work so that better understanding can be recorded. Two wall panels reinforced with double layers of wire fabric type B7 (B385) with a dimension of 75x1000x1500 mm (width:length:height) were prepared. The aspect ratio (h/L) and slenderness ratio (h/t) of the wall panel are 1.5 and 20 respectively. Grade 30 normal Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) with water cement ratio of 0.58 was used. The wall panels were tested under direct axial load without eccentricity, with pinned and fixed end support condition until failure. Experimental result shows that all wall panels failed due to buckling which the wall panels bend sideways with maximum lateral displacement ranges between 4.16mm to 5.02mm. It was found that splitting of the concrete at the front surface of the wall panel occurs due to the absence of the reinforcement action. Other than that, the deflection profile has shown a single curvature buckling pattern. Since proper design procedure is inadequate, this understanding could provide additional information pertaining to designing wire fabric reinforced concrete wall panel as load bearing wall in high rise construction