Prefabricated concrete sandwich and other lightweight wall panels for sustainable building construction: State-of-the-art review

Abstract

Prefabricated (or prefab) construction has become popular in recent years worldwide, owing to its advantages, including speed of construction, less wastage of materials, reduced labour demand, fabrication in a quality-controlled environment, and so on. Moreover, the current focus is on developing energy-efficient and sustainable buildings to reduce carbon emissions. To achieve this, prefab external wall panels that form the building envelope play a crucial role, as they maintain the indoor environment and thermal comfort and control the heating and cooling energy consumption, as well as the safety of the occupants of the buildings. Thus, the energy-efficient off-site fabricated building envelope significantly contributes to achieving net-zero targets in the construction sector set by the governments. An ideal prefabricated wall panel should be lightweight, eco-friendly, durable, fire-resistant, and easily installable. In addition, it should possess high strength, thermal resistance, and acoustic insulation. This study aims to review the most widely used external prefabricated wall panels in the building construction industry. Five types of prefab wall panels, namely, lightweight timber framed (LTF) panels, light-gauge steel-framed (LSF) panels, structural insulated panels (SIP), cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels and precast concrete sandwich panels (PCSP), which are commonly used for prefabricated building facades are reviewed with regards to their function, structural, thermal and fire performances, with an in-depth focus on the PCSPs. By reviewing the current research status and recent developments in materials, components, and structural performance of the PCSPs under various loading conditions, the current challenges and future work concerning the design of PCSPs and their applications in prefabricated construction are identified.