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Lightweight modular construction has become an increasing need to meet the housing requirements around the world today. The benefits of modular construction ranging from rapid production, consistency in quality, sustainability, and ease of use have widened the scope for the construction of residential, commercial, and even emergency preparedness facilities. This study introduces novel floor panels that can be flat-packed and built into modular housing components on-site with minimal labour and assistance. The flooring system uses hollow cellular panels made of various configurations of trapezoidal steel sheets. The structural performance of three different configurations of these hollow flooring systems as a modular component is presented in this study by analysing the failure modes, load-displacement parameters, and strain behaviour. The study confirms significant advantages of the proposed hollow floor systems, with multi-cells reporting higher load-carrying capacity. The hollow flooring system performed well in terms of structural performance and ease in fabrication as opposed to the conventional formworks and commercial temporary flooring systems. The proposed flooring system promises efficient application as working platforms or formworks in temporary infrastructural facilities and emergency construction activities.

A newly developed innovative steel–geopolymer concrete composite floor slab for use in modular construction is investigated in this study. We present experimental results on the flexural behaviour of eight modular sandwich composite floor slabs with different configurations containing self-compacting geopolymer concrete (SCGC) as infill and Basalt FRP (BFRP) bars as reinforcement. The use of sustainable infill material such as SCGC and non-corrosive BFRP in the proposed composite floor slabs is beneficial from the perspective of environmental sustainability. This study also compares the performance of these composite floor slabs against their hollow counterparts. The overlap between the cells in multi-cell panels acts as additional partitioning walls. The infill material offers the sandwich composite floor slabs significant advantages by improving their load-carrying capacity. A critical analysis of the composite floor slabs for load displacement, failure modes, and strain behaviour is also conducted. The study concludes that the sandwich panels with multiple smaller cells and infill materials exhibit a sound structural performance, reporting a 6–8 times higher load-carrying capacity than their hollow counterparts. A comparison of hollow and infilled panels shows that the infill sandwich panels are suitable as structural slabs. At the same time, the former is more suitable for temporary formworks, shelter, and pedestrian platform applications.

Trapezoidal-shaped thin-walled metallic profiled sheets are used in composite floor construction to enable rapid construction and reduce reinforcement and formwork requirements in concrete casting. However, relevant literature reported the early failure of steel sections due to the buckling and shear of existing trapezoidal and re-entrant decking profiles. There are also limitations regarding design rules for composite flooring systems. Current work aims to develop a new type of composite top-hat section for possible use in composite slim-floor construction. Sinusoidal metallic corrugated sheets that are widely used in building construction were utilized and a new bending technique was used to produce deck components, in which transverse corrugations were introduced along the main direction of the corrugated profile. This paper investigates the structural response of these new sections for several loading and support conditions using a pilot experimental scheme. The developed top-hat sections demonstrated considerable resistance to bending as well as buckling through effective stress re-distributions under considered construction stage loading for single span and continuous span conditions. Currently available design equations recommended by Australian Standards for a similar type of corrugated decks were used to predict the design strength and to compare it with those obtained experimentally. It was concluded that the expressions proposed by the code were inadequate for single span loading cases and would require modifications before being applied to the new profile.

The problem of structural optimization of trusses subject to stress and frequency constraints is considered from a practical viewpoint. Assuming that the choice of members has to be from a discrete set of available sections, the solution is attempted using a mathematical programming approach and an approximate two‐step procedure involving a continuous variable optimization followed by a discrete programming algorithm. The latter approach is highly promising for problems involving stress and frequency constraints. Detailed results are presented using several benchmark problems.

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This paper investigates the structural performance of a new two-way profiled steel decking system for steel-concrete composite slabs. Several studies have investigated steel decking for steel-concrete composite slabs and focused on utilising the conventional deck as a one-way floor system. The newly developed deck consists of top-hat sections formed by bending corrugated sheets at 90°, which are attached to a corrugated base sheet. The deck is designed for improved composite and two-way action contributed by its unique geometry due to corrugations in the transverse and longitudinal directions. This paper experimentally tested a novel steel decking geometry under construction stage loading. It was in the absence of concrete to establish the deck’s suitability for construction and contribution towards loading capacity and performance for future use as a two-way composite slab. Ultimate load, two-way action, and failure modes were identified. A finite element model was also developed, and parameters assessed that could influence the performance when the deck is potentially used in the composite stage. It was concluded that, while increasing the thickness of the corrugated base sheet significantly affects the load-carrying capacity, the thickness of the top hats has no significant impact. Improved load transfer with two-way behaviour is observed when the bottom flanges of the top hats are continuously connected to the bottom flanges of the adjacent top hats to form a deck. This contrasts with the concept deck, where individual top hats are attached to a corrugated base sheet. In this case, decks with a corrugated base sheet perform 54% better in ultimate load capacity than decks without a corrugated base sheet.