Development of Semi-Prefabricated Timber-Concrete Composite Floors in Australasia

An integrated research project on timber-concrete composite (TCC) floors in Australasia comprises of four primaryobjectives involving the University of Technology, Sydney; the University of Canterbury, Christchurch; and theUniversity of Sassari, Italy together with several industry partners. New applications of timber in multi-storey buildingsare being sought by the timber industry in both Australia and New Zealand. Current development and testing of mediumto long span flooring systems are highlighted. A semi-prefabricated TCC floor system that is economical, practical andeasy to construct is proposed. Four major phases of extensive investigations for short- and long-term, involving fullscale T-strip floor beams are described. The experimental results of phase one, short-term monitoring of beams arereported and compared with a uniaxial finite element model which was specially developed for long-term and collapseanalysis of TCC beams. Overall, the validations were found to have good accuracy except for some cases withacceptable experimental deviations. Other parameters observed were different construction variables and types ofconcrete.