Biaxial Slabs
Due to the limitations in hollow-core slabs, primarily lack of structural integrity, inflexibility and reduced architectural possibilities, focus has been on biaxial slabs and ways to reduce the weight. Several methods have been introduced during the last decades, but with very limited success, due to major problems with shear capacity and fire resistance as well as impractical execution.
For decades, several attempts have been made to create biaxial slabs with hollow cavities in order to reduce the weight. Most attempts have consisted of laying blocks of a less heavy material like expanded polystyrene between the bottom and top reinforcement, while other types included waffle slabs and grid slabs.
Of these types, only waffle slabs can be regarded to have a certain use in the market. But the use will always be very limited due to reduced resistances towards shear, local punching and fire. The idea of placing large blocks of light material in the slab suffers from the same flaws, which is why the use of these systems has never gained acceptance and they are only used in a limited number of projects in Spanish-speaking countries.
Below are various types of voided slab systems existing over the world (listed in alphabetical order):
Read more about this topic: Voided Biaxial Slab