Design of Sustainable Composite Flooring
TechnoCarbon© is a multiple award-wining start-up company focusing on low-carbon emission, high-performance construction materials. Technocarbon® develops, manufactures and commercializes innovative structural concepts based on a patented carbon-fibre and stone composite material technology known as CFS® that exhibits unparalleled properties, combining advantages of construction materials without their drawbacks.
A recent breakthrough from TechnoCarbon is a sustainable composite floor to replace traditional steel reinforced concrete floor. CFS® technology enables the replacement of emission-intensive steel and concrete while reducing the total weight compared to conventional floor and provide superior thermal resistance.
Oxybel’s mission was to provide Technocarbon with a structural design that meets Eurocode standard requirements and specifications in terms of total load capacity and total weight. In close collaboration with the client, Oxybel has initially developed reliable material models for the carbon-fibre stone material, based on a limited set of experimental results. Through an innovative modelling strategy, Oxybel derived a series of accurate material models for untested material variants accounting for client’s manufacturing constraints. The final structural floor design resulted in significant cost and time savings for the client. In a subsequent phase, topology optimization was used to develop an optimum flooring design achieving up to 50% weight saving compared to the incumbent solution.