Abstract
Traditional building materials may not be appropriate in view of the urgency in dealing with flash flood victims which need for immediate replacement of destroyed housing at a reasonable cost. Thus, the solution lies in making the best use of lightweight sandwich composite technology for flash flood victims lost residence in a short time. Therefore, this research focuses on comprehensive comparisons in bending of LWF sandwich/concrete (RC) composite beams. The flexural response of the LWF/RC beams is investigated in terms of crack load, load–deflection curves, stiffness, energy absorption capacity, ductility index, ultimate flexural load-to-weight ratio, load–strain curves, crack patterns, number of cracks, average crack width, crack spacing, and the failure mode. The test results reveal the remarkable enhancement in the flexural behavior and potential application for reconstruction of flash flood victims lost residence utilizing lightweight sandwich composite technology. The method outlined by ACI Building Code is used to compute ultimate moment capacities. The results obtained using this method are compared with the experimental results.