Industrial Fibre Concrete Floors : Experiences and Tests on Pile-Supported Slab

Sammanfattning: Pile supported floor slabs have often been designed solely in ultimate limit state ULS and then foremost with uniformly distributed loadings UDL. The investigation of serviceability limit state SLS has been of simpler nature, even according to the governing codes of practice.Often it has been minimum‑reinforced with the presumption that full friction to the supporting ground is present, whit‑out any inspection, which by the Swedish code of practice even more reduced the addition of crack reinforcement. The cracks have not been controlled, before they in fact have occurred. For pile supported floor slabs the ground support will be there still, at least for a time, after the casting. As the ground settles, as dehydration always will occur, and drainage and the covering roof the precipitation to reach the ground, the slab will often be completely free bearing between the piles. The minimum reinforcement is based on the assumption that only the upper layer is needed to reinforce due to dehydration shrinkage – despite that the whole floor section in time will obtain the same moisture profile and also shrinkage magnitude. One often excludes the influence of creep and temperature and the affect from external loading and local variance of restraints in calculations in the SLS. Research on behaviour in SLS has been modest; in spite of that the contractors and the client and finally the end‑user of the floors often suffer from these problems.It has by this thesis been established that the shrinkage of the concrete used for industrial floors is large 0.9‑1.1 ‰, and that the problem foremost arise from cracking and problems with joints and unevenness in the floor. The integrated method for design and production of industrial floors is a way to the solution, but requires that all involved assign to co‑operate to 100 %. Furthermore it is required that one selects the proper materials to the proper design and the proper production method. If one will save cost this will often be on materials; which will lead to reduced reinforcement content and reduced concrete thickness. This way is wrong and will in end make the client suffer economically. A way to solve this has been to cast the floors with steel fibre concrete SFC; from the beginning often a little bit thicker and with moderate steel fibre content and complementary reinforcement, compared to present execution. The competition from abroad has nevertheless shaped solutions that with thinner slabs and less traditional reinforcement and invalid design calculations compete on faulty grounds. This work demonstrates how this make the floor suffer in ULS and SLS.Trough full‑scale testing (half of a normally loaded industrial floor in matter of geometry) where a pile supported floor slab has been simulated by a flat‑slab floor cast in steel fibre concrete, it has been shown that the solution with steel fibre concrete performs well  in slabs for industrial floors. On one hand it gives the opportunity to production wise superior methods for placing concrete which potentially could gain the environment with reduced reinforcement content, and on the other hand SFC brings a ductile failure behaviour for loadings with much larger magnitudes than in normal ULS design, and further SFC provides with a stiffer response and with possibility to construct slabs with small creep deformation.Finally it has been established that, when it comes to short‑term point loadings (ULS) and with long-term point loadings (SLS) one can rely on the bearing capacity and the tough behaviour of SFC. And that one may exert an influence on both limit states, through variation of the SFC and the reinforcement content. This is shown for a real bearing structure, the pile supported industrial floor, and that in a safe way.