Foamed Concrete Layer as Sub-structure of Industrial Concrete Floor

Nowadays, the development of building industry and the increasing demand for building materials together compose the emergence of new warehouse centers. This trend enables building materials to be delivered more efficiently and within shorter time, thus making them more cost-attractive. At the same time, the sustainable development policy causes new materials and solutions to become more favorable by decreasing the amount of materials applied and reducing the energy consumption in industrial buildings. Concrete industrial floors must meet a number of requirements such as limited cracking, flatness and sufficient load-bearing capacity. Besides redundancy and visual aspects, the industrial floors are also required to show good thermal performance. The development and application of foamed concrete layer, due to its mechanical performance and thermal properties seem to be an adequate solution as substructure layer for industrial floors. The article shows results of numerical simulations of concrete industrial floor with foam concrete layer as substructure. It also includes a comparison of numerical results with a simplified analytical approach which is commonly used by structural engineers. Mechanical properties of foamed concrete, used in the analyses, were based on tests performed within the research project. The numerical simulations were performed with the use of ZSoil finite element software. This work was supported by the on-going research project "Stabilization of weak soil by application of layer of foamed concrete used in contact with subsoil" (LIDER/022/537/L-4/NCBR/2013), financed by The National Centre for Research and Development within the LIDER Programme.