The Behaviour of Concrete Wall Panel with Opening

Chong, Fung Yun (2020) The Behaviour of Concrete Wall Panel with Opening. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS).

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Abstract

Reinforced concrete wall panels with cut-out opening are the common structural component which are utilised in the construction industry. This research study carries out is aimed at evaluating and determining the structural behaviour of the reinforced concrete wall panels with various cut-out opening sizes, shapes and location. The maximum principal strain and stress, deformation and failure load were used to explain the behaviour of the reinforced concrete wall panels. A parametric study was performed with layered finite element method (LFEM) wall modelling by using the ANSYS software (Version 19.1). In order to evaluate the behaviour of the one-way reinforced concrete wall panels on its opening size, seven different wall types have been modelled, one solid wall and six walls with square opening size ratios, Ao/A between 1% to 20%. The failure loads decrease by around 90% when the opening size ratio increases to 20%. The results shown is in accordance to the hypothesis tested of which the increase in opening size tends to decrease the strength of the reinforced concrete wall panels. In addition, as the 10% of square opening size was taken as the controlled results, the parametric study showed that the investigated shapes of opening gave a reduction in failure load. The effect of the opening shapes which influenced the behaviour of the reinforced concrete wall panels was due to the top or bottom spandrel to the opening and also the areas remained between the left or right piers to the opening sides. To fully understand the behaviour of the reinforced concrete wall panels with opening, the hypothesis design criteria was carried out by manipulating the locations of the opening by shifting it towards the vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions. When the location of the opening is shifted vertically downwards, the failure load has increased. It was mainly due to the increase in the spandrel areas and distance between the top of the opening to the axial loads. Likewise,when the location of the opening was shifted away from the centre towards the incline directions, it exhibited the same trend of result outcomes with the increase in failure load because the eccentricity has moved away from the centre towards the concentrated areas of which the load acts on the wall panel. For the horizontal allocations of opening, it shows that the further the opening located from the centre, the smaller the failure loads since the eccentricity of the axial loads applied to the opening has been altered and therefore it caused the unbalance distributions of stresses and strains around the areas of the opening and caused the wall panel to deform and decrease in strength. In summary, the variety of the opening sizes, shapes and locations influenced the behaviour of the reinforced concrete wall panels. If the size of opening on the reinforced concrete wall panel is greater, then the strength of the wall panel will be decreased. When the reinforced concrete wall panels are loaded under one-way axial loads, the distributions of the maximum stresses and strains always concentrated around the areas of the opening. The degree of deformations illustrated by the wall panels corresponding to its failure loads of which the wall can be sustained before failure. As this research study is aims to reveal the utilisation of the reinforced concrete wall panel in the construction industry especially the on-site cut off opening due to uncertainty situations on site, therefore, this research contributes valuable knowledge on the effect of opening to the behavior of reinforced concrete wall panels.

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