Composite floor system with cold-formed trussed beams and prefabricated concrete slab - Selected and extended contribution of SDSS 2019

Steel-concrete composite floor systems represent a common solution for buildings, leading to reduced material consumption and improving the structural strength and flexural stiffness. Lightweight steel frame construction systems, based on the combination of thin-walled cold-formed steel members (CFS) and panels (e.g. wood, cementitious, gypsum plaster), may also benefit from the composite behaviour in the case of concrete slabs. In this context, full-scale experimental tests were conducted to evaluate the structural behaviour of a floor system conceived with 0.95 mm thick CFS trussed beams and prefabricated concrete slabs. An innovative solution for shear connectors was designed and tested in order to ensure full interaction between the CFS trussed beam and the concrete slab. The thin-walled channel (TWC) connector is based on a lipped channel CFS attached to the top chord of the truss by standard self-drilling screws. Experimental results indicate efficient behaviour of the TWC shear connectors with improved bending capacity of the floor system.