Flexural behaviours of one-way steel-concrete-steel sandwich panels with novel hybrid connectors: Tests and analysis

A steel-concrete-steel sandwich panel with novel hybrid connectors (SCSSP-HC) was proposed in this paper, and the flexural behaviours of the SCSSP-HC were obtained via conducting four-point bending tests. All the tested SCSSP-HCs exhibited the typical flexural failure mode with three specific failure types being categorized. The typical load-displacement response of the SCSSP-HC exhibited initial elastic stage, strength hardening stage and descending stage. In addition, the effects of faceplate thickness, spacing of headed stud, shear span and loading direction on the responses of SCSSP-HCs were quantitatively studied. The results indicated that the flexural resistance and elastic stiffness of the SCSSP-HC could be significantly improved via increasing the steel faceplate thickness and decreasing the shear span. However, the spacing of headed stud and loading direction had insignificant effect on the responses of the SCSSP-HC. Moreover, an analytical model was developed to predict the elastic stiffness, yielding moment and ultimate moment of the SCSSP-HC, and the accuracy of the analytical model was validated via comparing the analytical predictions with experimental results.