Experimental Evaluation of Epoxy Based Wood Plank-concrete Composite Floor Systems for Mill Building Renovations

摘要

Adaptive reuse of industrial mill buildings is a growing trend that has proven economic and environmental advantages over new development. This paper presents an experimental study as a preliminary investigation into two novel techniques to upgrade old floors for improved strength and stiffness by adding and bonding concrete to existing planks to form a composite deck. Three full scale wood plank-concrete composite floor decks were fabricated and tested to failure in four point bending. The three specimens differed only in the type of interfacial connector between the planking and the concrete slab: one specimen used a layer of epoxy designed to bond wet concrete to wood; another used a layer of cured epoxy as well as an evenly distributed layer of embedded aggregate; and the final specimen had no deliberate connection. The latter was the control specimen, which relied only on friction between the two components. The results suggested that both techniques could significantly improve deck strength and stiffness over having no connection between the planks and concrete. The epoxy specimen proved to be the strongest (over 4 times the strength of the control specimen), whereas the epoxy-aggregate specimen was the stiffest (approximately 2.5 times the stiffness of the control specimen).