An experimental and numerical study on the in-plane axial and shear behavior of sprayed in-situ concrete sandwich panels

The pa­per deals with the ex­per­i­men­tal and nu­mer­i­cal char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the in-plane ax­ial and shear me­chan­i­cal be­hav­ior of sprayed in-situ re­in­forced con­crete (RC) sand­wich pan­els, used as struc­tural walls. Ax­ial com­pres­sion tests were car­ried out on spec­i­mens with dif­fer­ent slen­der­ness ra­tios to study their be­hav­ior un­der ax­ial ver­ti­cal loads. While the di­ag­o­nal com­pres­sion test and shear load with con­stant com­pres­sion test were re­spec­tively per­formed on squared pan­els, an­a­lyz­ing their re­sponse to in-plane hor­i­zon­tal lat­eral forces. Ul­ti­mate ax­ial and shear loads have been ex­per­i­men­tally de­ter­mined and the most sig­nif­i­cant load–dis­place­ment di­a­grams have been re­ported. The ob­tained re­sults have been com­pared with other ex­per­i­men­tal cam­paigns on RC sand­wich pan­els and with con­ven­tional RC walls equa­tions, avail­able in codes of prac­tice and lit­er­a­ture. The struc­tural po­ten­tial­i­ties of RC sand­wich pan­els as load-bear­ing and shear walls are high­lighted. The ex­per­i­men­tal in­ves­ti­ga­tion is cor­rob­o­rated by a 3D non­lin­ear fi­nite el­e­ment (FE) nu­mer­i­cal analy­sis, con­sid­er­ing the in­flu­ence of the in­su­la­tion layer, the ef­fi­ciency of steel con­nec­tors, and the in­volved ma­te­r­ial non­lin­ear­i­ties.