The structural behaviour of prefabricated wall constructed using wood-wool cement composite panel / Mohammad Soffi Md Noh

Nowadays, the Malaysian government has aggressively promoted the new construction technique, namely as Industrialized Building System (IBS). The use of IBS component in building construction significantly minimizes the cost, speed up the construction period, reducing the dependent on foreign labor and minimize the construction waste. However, the IBS components are produced from non-renewable resources, highly carbon emission and heavy weight. In view of this, the prefabricated wall constructed using wood-wool cement panel (WWCP) has been developed as a new load bearing wall system for low rise building. In the current practice, the construction technique of the WWCP wall is similarly as the brick or block laying process where, the WWCP were vertically stacked in running bond pattern to form a wall panel. This technique was seen not well established in terms of load carrying capacity and consumed the long construction period. Due to this, an experimental investigation to study the structural behaviour of wall fabricated with different WWCP arrangement and joint technique subjected to a different loading condition is undertaken. The new panel arrangement technique has been proposed by integrating a strip of 50 mm thickness of WWCP in two layers at different arrangement of panel orientation. The front side of the strip panels has been horizontally laid in the longitudinal direction, whereas rear side in transverse direction. The front and rear side panels were bonded together using 15 mm thickness of cement mortar to form a stable wall panel. The wall panels then, was plastered with the 16 mm thickness of cement mortar on both surfaces. There are three different square wall sizes of 600 mm, 1200 mm and 2400 mm were considered and tested under axial compression, diagonal compression and in-plane lateral load up to failure. The structural behaviour in terms of ultimate load carrying capacity, load-displacement profile and failure mode behaviour of the wall panels were observed and recorded through out of the experimental program. The experimental results revealed that the new developed full scale prefabricated wood-wool wall panel exceeded 5 times load bearing capacity of a double storey house which achieved the compressive strength of 432.73 kN/m. This lightweight prefabricated wood-wool wall panel shows a great potential to be developed further as one of the IBS load bearing wall system in Malaysia.