Prefabricated reinforced concrete cladding panels supports: Design and numerical modelling

Prefabricated Reinforced Concrete (RC) cladding panels are often adopted in industrial facilities. While they are usually characterized by high strength and easiness of construction, their supports can represent a weak point. Indeed, the connections between the panel and the structure play a key role for the cladding safety. Without an appropriate design the connection can presents a brittle behaviour. High stress concentration, aging and exposure to aggressive environmental conditions that can accelerate the materials degradation represent some of the critical aspects in the connection design. This work, starting from a real case study describing the collapse of a RC cladding panel of a cooling tower, presents new simple design approaches for the supports. An accurate numerical analysis of the mechanical behaviour is also performed with a nonlinear Finite Element model developed in ANSYS environment.