Poplar laminated veneer lumber (poplar LVL) is made of fast-growing poplar veneer and structural adhesive, which owns the advantages of sustainability and stable quality. Here an innovative poplar LVL floor diaphragm is presented, mainly made up of orthogonal rib beams fitted together using L-shape steel connectors. The paper mainly deals with an experimental study on the bending behavior of the floor under transverse uniform load. Full-scale testing on eight 3.6 m × 4.8 m specimens shows that the damage phenomena of the floor mainly exhibited as the separation between the rib beams and pulling out from the rib beam for the tapping screw. Though some local damage phenomena appeared before the preset maximum loading level, the load-deflection curves basically kept linear for most of the specimens. Under the service load level of 2.5 kN/m2, the distribution of deflection and strain for the full-length rib beam substantially exhibited the characteristic of a two-way slab. In contrast, for the segmented rib beam, the situation was much more complex. Due to the parametric design of the specimens, testing results illustrated that the rib beam height played the most important role in floor stiffness. Next was the sheathing panel, while the role of segmented rib beam spacing was relatively unremarkable. At last, a revised pseudo-plate method was proposed to evaluate the maximum deflection of the novel floor, which considered the composite action by rigidity factors.
Wood is one of the most popular renewable natural materials. Nowadays, raw wood is hardly ever used in the construction industry. It has been substituted by glued laminated wood that is processed with the use of high-tech methods, thus eliminating the principal flaws and defects of the natural material. The deformability of glued laminated beams with combined reinforcement has been studied, under which the steel reinforcement of the periodic profile was placed in the dappings of the upper compressed zone, while ribbon-reinforced composite was glued to the bottom of the stretched zone. The graphical charts for the layer change of the deformations of wood, steel, and composite reinforcement from the beginning of the loading application to the moment of destruction are presented.
In this paper, an experimental research on bending behaviour of end-notched glulam beams and their bending behaviour after repairing with glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars is presented. Altogether five glulam beams (100 x 220 x 4000 mm) made of spruce timber classified in the strength class C22 were tested. Experiment showed that originally, the beams failed in a brittle manner due to crack opening and its propagation. Cracks in the notch details were a result of excessive tensile stresses perpendicular to grain and shear stresses. Repairing the beams with GFRP bars after their failure completely restored and notably improved their load carrying capacity (average increase of 194%). Failure mechanism after repair changed from the original brittle tensile failure to more ductile failure in bending for most beams, proving the successfulness of the intervention. This study gives an insight in rehabilitation and repair possibilities of existing structures using advanced materials like GFRP bars.
Experimental tests of a composite concrete-cross-laminated timber (CLT) floor system were conducted. The floor system was constructed with 5-ply CLT panels (6.75 in. thick) made composite with a 2.25 in. thick reinforced concrete topping slab. Four series of tests were performed using different specimen configurations and laboratory testing methods. Tests included: (1) Comparative one-way bending tests (CB) to evaluate the performance of alternative shear connectors used to join the concrete slab to the CLT panel; (2) Orthotropic stiffness and strength tests (OS) to evaluate the elastic orthotropic stiffness of the deck system and provide strength results for weak-axis bending and negative moment strength; (3) Full-scale system performance tests (FS) of a continuous floor span to establish strength at realistic span lengths and the influence of continuity; and (4) Long-term deformation tests (LT) to investigate creep deflections of the composite concrete-CLT floor system considering positive and negative bending influences.
Results include overall strength, elastic stiffness values, deformation capacity, slip deformations along the concrete-CLT interface, predicted neutral axis locations in the composite concrete-CLT systems, and connection deformations.
Timber beams can effectively be reinforced using externally bonded fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) composites. This paper describes a nonlinear 3-dimensional finite element model which was developed in order to accurately simulate the bending behaviour of unreinforced and carbon FRP plate reinforced glulam beams. The model incorporates suitable constitutive relationship for each material and utilises anisotropic plasticity theory for timber in compression. Failure of beams was modelled based on the maximum stress criterion. The results of the finite element analysis showed a good agreement with experimental findings for load-deflection behaviour, stiffness, ultimate load carrying capacity and strain profile distribution of unreinforced and reinforced beams. The proposed model can be used to examine the effect of different geometries or materials on the mechanical performance of reinforced system.
