Numerical simulation of hollow steel profiles for lightweight concrete sandwich panels

The focus of the present study is to investigate both local and global behaviour of a precast concrete sandwich panel. The selected prototype consists of two reinforced concrete layers coupled by a system of cold-drawn steel profiles and one intermediate layer of insulating material. High-definition nonlinear finite element (FE) models, based on 3D brick and 2D interface elements, are used to assess the capacity of this technology under shear, tension and compression. Geometrical nonlinearities are accounted via large displacement-large strain formulation, whilst material nonlinearities are included, in the series of simulations, by means of Von Mises yielding criterion for steel elements and a classical total strain crack model for concrete; a bond-slip constitutive law is additionally adopted to reproduce steel profile-concrete layer interaction. First, constitutive models are calibrated on the basis of preliminary pull and pull-out tests for steel and concrete, respectively. Geometrically and materially nonlinear FE simulations are performed, in compliance with experimental tests, to validate the proposed modeling approach and characterize shear, compressive and tensile response of this system, in terms of global capacity curves and local stress/strain distributions. Based on these experimental and numerical data, the structural performance is then quantified under various loading conditions, aimed to reproduce the behaviour of this solution during production, transport, construction and service conditions.