The popularity of thin concrete shell roofs has gradually declined over the past few decades, despite their many advantages. The main reason for this decline has been the costly and labour-intensive process of constructing and removing the necessary formwork and falsework. To overcome this difficulty, a new shell roof system, referred to herein as the Comshell system, has recently been proposed. A Comshell roof is constructed from a steel base shell formed by bolting together a large number of

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... tandard size modular units and cast in-situ concrete. The steel base shell serves as both the permanent formwork and the tensile reinforcement. A main design issue of Comshell roofs is the buckling strength of the bolted steel base shell during the construction stage under wet concrete loading. Due to the many bolted connections, the behaviour of these bolted base shells is complicated, so experiments are required to gain structural insight and the necessary test data for subsequent verification of numerical models. This paper is concerned with the experimental behaviour of these base shells at model scale, presenting both the experimental set-up and the results of the first experiment.