New composite SIP and steel hybrid house system

Axia Materials Co. Ltd. (Hwaseong-si, Korea), a manufacturer of Organosheet, Composite SIP (Structural Insulated Panel) and building solutions using these materials, announced its new development of LitePan Composite SIP with CFS (Cold Form Steel) hybrid structure house systems. CFS house is a well- known building structural system for excellent seismic resist with pre-fabri- cated housing capability. But the many processes of insulation and water proof finishing job of CFS lead to higher cost than conventional building materials.

This Composite-CFS Hybrid house system was developed together with Korean CFS company, Steelite Co., LTD., to bring the maximum value of energy insulation, fast construction, cost saving, sustainability, and earth- quake and hurricane proof structure. And this LitePan SIP- CFS house system eliminated the usage of OSB or Plywood and this solved the worry on long term durability on these organic wood materials.

But this Composite to CFS hybrid building system needed many new developments especially on the connection details between Composite and CFS and also on the solution for different CTE (Coefficient of thermal expansion).

Axia invented Composite-Steel connecting fastening system to have 1,400Nm (1,302 ft.lbf) for pull out strength for each fastener connections and this property contributed the strong enough connections to CFS to pass required structural performance of this villa.

Also all the connections were engineered to have proper CTE matching between Composite SIP and CFS.

All the CFS were prepared in factory with punched holes and CFS walls were preassembled with various forms including C and H shapes. And LitePan SIPs were delivered on site as precut with its average dimension of 2.7m x 9.0m.

The process of connections was done on-site by hand tools only and all LitePan SIPs were enveloped and completely sealed the whole area of this Villa using Axia’s LiteTex composite profile with structural glue system to have a monocoque system. The total construction of Composite-CFS hybrid system took 1 week while conventional system takes more than 6 weeks in this island.

By this dramatic save of time and labor the total cost of this villa construction was decreased by 20% more than original plan.

This Villa is approved to have 1-hour fire proof, hurricane resist and earthquake resist structure. By additional structural property of LitePan SIP, this villa is using only 50% of CFS comparing to conventional 100% CFS structural design.

Axia Materials Co. Ltd. is part of the AZL international composites network. This post is courtesy of the CompositesWorld and AZL Aachen GmbH media partnership.