Flexural Behavior of Cold-Formed Steel-Timber Composite Flooring Systems

Abstract

Composite flooring systems comprising cold-formed steel beams and timber floorboards have been proposed recently for building flooring as efficient, economical, durable, and sustainable solutions. In this study, a parameterized three-dimensional (3D) finite-element model for analyzing the performance of such flooring systems has been developed and validated against experimental data reported for a specific steel/particle board (PB) flooring system in the literature. Once validated, the model was used to investigate the flexural behavior of various composite floors by replacing the PB with a range of sustainable engineered products with known mechanical properties. The results of this study provide insight into the use of various sustainable engineered board products in novel composite flooring systems and the importance of their elastic constants. It has also become apparent that the flexural behavior of the studied composite flooring systems is governed mainly by the connections between the cold-formed steel beams and the floorboards.