Experimental and analytical studies of curved steel–concrete–steel sandwich panels under patch loads

• Novel ultra-lightweight cement composite is used in curved SCS sandwich panel.
• Explore the ultimate strength behaviour of curved SCS sandwich panel.
• The main failure modes are flexural, concrete crushing and shear tension failure.
• Propose a unified model to predict the shear resistance of sandwich panel.

The paper proposes a novel curved steel–concrete–steel (SCS) sandwich panel for Arctic offshore platform to resist the ice loads due to ice floes in Arctic region. The SCS sandwich panel consists of two curved steel plates infilled with a type of novel ultra-lightweight cement composite (ULCC) with a compressive strength of 60 MPa and a density less than 1400 kg/m3. Headed shear studs working in pairs with overlapped lengths are used to achieve composite action between the core material and steel face plates. This paper investigates the performance of curved SCS sandwich composite panel experimentally and analytically. Ten quasi-static tests on the curved sandwich composite panels subjected to patch loads are carried out to explore their failure modes, ultimate strength and load–defection behaviour. The main failure modes of the tests are identified as flexural failure, diagonal concrete strut crushing and shear tension failure. Based on the failure mechanism, a unified deep beam model is constructed to estimate the shear resistance of flat and curved SCS sandwich panels by considering equilibrium status, material yielding criteria and boundary conditions. The validations show that the modified model can provide close and conservative estimations on shear resistance for SCS sandwich composite panel.

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