Corrugated Wood Composite Panels For Structural Decking

addition to the channel depth, panel thickness also plays an important role in the relativebending properties.As opposed to the channel depth, panel thickness has an inverse relation with therelative stiffness and strength. In other words, increasing the thickness will reduce therelative bending property gains of corrugated panels over flat panels having the samethickness. Both the relative stiffness and relative strength decrease asymptotically toward1.0 as the panel thickness increases beyond the channel depth. This suggests that thethickness should be kept as thin as possible in order to maximize the stiffening effect ofcorrugations. Nevertheless, there are some limitations on the thinness of panels that canbe used as structural decking materials. Panels less than 5 / 16 ” are not suitable for use asdecking material because other problems, such as insufficient panel rigidity and panelpunching shear strength through the thickness, may arise.The effect of changing the wavelength is not significant. Changing thewavelength of the baseline corrugation profile from 4” to 12” slightly increases therelative stiffness and relative strength, from 11.1 to 12.4 and 3.7 to 4.2, respectively.Increasing the wavelength also increases the deck opening (see Figure 2), which requiresthe underlayment to span a longer distance. This might impose bending or punching shearproblems for the flat panels or underlayment placed on top of the corrugated panels.Thus, shorter wavelength is favorable as long as the selected wavelength does not greatlyincrease the difficulty in molding the section. Besides the bending performance,moldability is also another important factor to be considered in the determination ofsuitable corrugation profiles. The molding difficulty of different corrugated profiles willbe discussed in the following section.12