What Are Houses Built with Prefabricated Floor Slabs Called

Houses built with prefabricated floor slabs are usually called prefabricated panel buildings, prefabricated assembled buildings, or prefabricated panel houses. Here is a detailed explanation:

Prefabricated Panel Buildings

Prefabricated panel buildings are a typical representative of industrialized building systems, with the core feature being the factory production and on-site assembly of building components. Specifically, structural components such as floor slabs, wall panels, and beams and columns are prefabricated in factories using standardized molds. After being cured to reach the design strength, they are transported to the construction site and spliced into an overall structure through methods such as welding, bolt connection, or wet operations (e.g., concrete pouring). This construction method significantly shortens the on-site construction period, reduces the use of formwork and the amount of wet operations, and at the same time, the quality of components is more stable under factory environmental control, which is conducive to improving the overall accuracy of the building. For example, from the 1980s to the 1990s, a large number of multi-story residential buildings constructed in China used a combination of prefabricated hollow floor slabs and prefabricated wall panels, forming a typical prefabricated panel building system.

Prefabricated Assembled Buildings

Prefabricated assembled buildings are a broader concept, covering all types of buildings formed by assembling prefabricated components. According to the component combination method, they can be divided into three major categories:

• Panel-assembled: Using prefabricated floor slabs and wall panels as the main load-bearing or enclosure components, forming a spatial structure through node connections, commonly seen in residential buildings;
• Box-assembled: Taking complete rooms (including floor slabs, walls, and roofs) as modules and prefabricating them in factories, which are then directly stacked and assembled on site, mostly used in temporary buildings or low-rise residential buildings;
• Frame-assembled: Using prefabricated concrete frames (beams and columns) as the main structural body, with floor slabs and wall panels as infill components, suitable for multi-story and high-rise buildings. As a key component, prefabricated floor slabs play an important role in various types of assembled buildings, and their collaborative design with frames, shear walls, and other structures is the core to ensuring building safety.

Prefabricated Panel Houses

"Prefabricated panel houses" is a colloquial term, usually referring to houses with prefabricated floor slabs as the main horizontal load-bearing components. These houses may adopt partial prefabricated components (e.g., only floor slabs are prefabricated) or a fully prefabricated system (both floor slabs and wall panels are prefabricated), commonly seen in early industrialized residential buildings, rural self-built houses, and temporary resettlement houses. Their advantages lie in fast construction speed and low cost, but attention should be paid to the quality of node connections and overall design to avoid leakage or structural weaknesses caused by improper treatment of component joints. In modern engineering, through improvements such as high-strength grouting materials and prestressing technology, the seismic performance and durability of prefabricated panel houses have been significantly improved.