Flexural behavior of composite structural insulated panels with magnesium oxide board facings

Abstract

The current report is devoted to the flexural analysis of a composite structural insulated panel (CSIP) with magnesium oxide board facings and expanded polystyrene (EPS) core, that was recently introduced to the building industry. An advanced nonlinear FE model was created in the ABAQUS environment, able to simulate the CSIP’s flexural behavior in great detail. An original custom code procedure was developed, which allowed to include material bimodularity to significantly improve the accuracy of computational results and failure mode predictions. Material model parameters describing the nonlinear range were identified in a joint analysis of laboratory tests and their numerical simulations performed on CSIP beams of three different lengths subjected to three- and four-point bending. The model was validated by confronting computational results with experimental results for natural scale panels; a good correlation between the two results proved that the proposed model could effectively support the CSIP design process.