Development of a retrofit anchor system for remodeling of building exteriors

To enable remodeling of the exterior of buildings more convenient, such finishing materials as curtain walls, metal panels, concrete panels or dry stones need to be easily detached. In this respect, this study proposed a new design of the slab for the purposes. In the new design, the sides of the slab were properly modified, and the capabilities of anchors fixed in the modified slab were experimentally tested. In details, a number of concrete specimens with different sizes and compressive strengths were prepared, and the effect of anchors with different diameters and embedment depths applied in the concrete specimens were tested. The test results of the maximum capacities of the anchors were compared with the number of current design codes and the stress distribution was identified. This study found that the embedment depth specified in the current design code (ACI318-08) should be revised to be more than 1.5 times the edge distance. However, with the steel sheet reinforcement, the experiment acquired higher tensile strength than the design code proposed. In addition, for two types of specimens in the tensile strength experiment, the current design code (ACI 318-08) is overestimated for the anchor depth of 75 mm. This study demonstrated that the ideal breakout failure was attainable for the side slot details of a slab with more than 180 mm of a slab thickness and less than 75 mm of an anchor embedment depth. It is expected that these details of the modified slab can be specified in the upgraded construction design codes.