This article presents a test method that was developed to screen adhesive formulations for finger-jointed lumber. The goal was to develop a small-scale test that could be used to predict whether an adhesive would pass a full-scale ASTM E119 wall assembly test. The method involved loading a 38-mm square finger-jointed sample in a four-point bending test inside of an oven with a target sample temperature of 204°C. The deformation (creep) was examined as a function of time. It was found that samples fingerjointed with melamine formaldehyde and phenol resorcinol formaldehyde adhesives had the same creep behavior as solid wood. One-component polyurethane and polyvinyl acetate adhesives could not maintain the load at the target temperature measured middepth of the sample, and several different types of creep behavior were observed before failure. This method showed that the creep performance of the onecomponent adhesives may be quite different than the performance from short-term load deformation curves collected at high temperatures. The importance of creep performance of adhesives in the fire resistance of engineered wood is discussed.
Strength parameters for fasteners determined in accordance with the methods prescribed for the European CE-marking leads to quite different values for seemingly similar products from different manufactures. The results are hardly repeatable, to some extent due to difficulties in selecting representative timber samples for the testing. Beside this uncertainty, the declared values available to the designer concerns only structural timber, so no strength parameters are available for common engineered wood products such as LVL or plywood
Euromech Colloquim 556 Theoretical Numerical and Experimental Analyses of Wood Mechanics
Research Status
Complete
Notes
May 2015, Dresde, Germany
Summary
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) panels are more and more common in timber construction. When submitted to out-of-plane loads, they can be considered as multi-layer plates with anisotropic behaviour. Their main structural issue is the low transverse shear strength of cross layers which leads to rolling shear failure. In addition the fabrication process can include or not lateral boards’ gluing. The resulting discontinuities can be considered as weakly heterogeneous and influence the mechanical response. Moreover the timber construction market requires new technical solutions for CLT, like periodic voids within the panel. This solution leads to lighter and more thermally efficient floors. However, the spaced voids between boards increase the heterogeneity of the panel and therefore the complexity of stresses’ distribution.
Advanced Wood-Based Solutions for Mid-Rise and High-Rise Construction: In-Situ Testing of the Brock Commons 18-Storey Building for Vibration and Acoustic performances
This report addresses serviceability issues of tall wood buildings focusing on their vibration and sound insulation performance. The sound insulation and vibration performance may not affect the building’s safety, but affects the occupants’ comfort and the proper operation of the buildings and the function of sensitive equipment, consequently the acceptance of the midrise and tall wood buildings in market place. Lack of data, knowledge and experience of sound and vibration performance of tall wood buildings is one of the issues related to design and construction of tall wood buildings.
The measured and estimated values should also be correlated with actual experiences of the occupants in the building if such information is obtained, for example, through a survey.
Project contact is Keri Ryan at University of Nevada, Reno
Summary
A landmark shake table test of a 10-story mass timber building will be conducted in late 2020. The test program, funded by other sources, will help accelerate the adoption of economically competitive tall timber buildings by validating the seismic performance of a resilient cross-laminated timber (CLT) rocking wall system. In this project, we leverage and extend the test program by including critical nonstructural components and systems (NCS). Including NCSs, which are most vulnerable to rocking induced deformations of the CLT core, allows investigation of the ramification of this emerging structural type on building resiliency. Quantifying interactions amongst vertically and horizontally spanning NCSs during earthquake shaking will allow designers to develop rational design strategies for future installation of such systems. The expected research outcomes are to expand knowledge of rocking wall system interactions with various NCS, identify NCS vulnerabilities in tall timber buildings, and develop solutions to address these vulnerabilities. Moreover, this effort will greatly increase visibility of the test program. The results of this research will be widely disseminated to timber design and NCS communities through conference presentations, online webinars, and distribution to publicly accessible research repositories.
Glued laminated timber (glulam) is manufactured by gluing and stacking timber lamellas,
which are sawn and finger-jointed parallel to the wood grain direction. This results in a
sustainable and competitive construction material in terms of dimensional versatility and
load-carrying capacity. With the proliferation of glued timber constructions, there is an
increasing concern about safety problems related to adhesive bonding. Delaminations are
caused by manufacturing errors and in service climate variations simultaneously combined
with long-sustained loads (snow, wind and gravel filling on flat roofs). Several recent
building collapses were related to bonding failure, which should be prevented in the future
with a timely defect detection. As an outlook, the feasibility of air-coupled ultrasound tomography was demonstrated with numerical tests and preliminary experiments on glulam. The FDTD wave propagation model was excited by the difference of the time-reversed sound fields transmitted through a test and a reference (defect-free) glulam cross-section. Both datasets were obtained with the same SLT setup. Wave convergences then provided a map of bonding defects along the height and width of the inspected glulam cross-sections. Further
research is envisaged in this direction
Knots are usually regarded as defects when grading lumber. In order to evaluate a member under out-of-plane loading, shear strength is one of the major mechanical properties, specifically, rolling shear (RS) strength is one of the critical mechanical properties of Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), which determines the flexural strength of CLT under short-span bending loads. Lower grade lumber with a higher percentage of knots is recommended to be utilized for the cross-layer laminations which are mainly responsible for resisting shear stresses. Firstly, shear tests were performed in order to evaluate the effect of knots on longitudinal shear strength using shear blocks. After that, the effect of knots on the RS strength of 3-ply southern yellow pine CLT were investigated by experimental tests and an analytical model. Center-point bending tests with a span-to-depth ratio of 6 and two-plate shear tests with a loading angle of 14° were conducted on six CLT configurations composed of different types of cross layer laminations: clear flatsawn lumber with/without pith, lumber with sound knots with/without pith, and lumber with decayed knots with/without pith. The shear analogy method was implemented to evaluate the RS strength values from the bending test results, which were also compared against the results from the two-plate shear tests. It was found that: (1) The shear blocks containing sound knots had higher shear strength than matched clear shear blocks, the shear blocks containing unsound knots had lower shear strength than the matched clear shear blocks. (2) CLT specimens with cross-layer laminations with either sound knots or decayed knots had higher RS strength. (3) In general, the shear analogy method underestimated the RS strength of CLT specimens containing knots and pith.
The fiber-reinforced polymer is one kind of composite material made of synthetic fiber and resin, which has attracted research interests for the reinforcement of timber elements. In this study, 18 glued-laminated (glulam) beams, unreinforced or reinforced with internally embedded carbon fiber–reinforced polymer (CFRP) sheets, were tested under four-point bending loads. For the reinforced glulam beams, the influences of the strengthening ratio, the modulus of elasticity of the CFRP, and the CFRP arrangement on their bending performance were experimentally investigated. Subsequently, a finite element model developed was verified with the experimental results; furthermore, a general theoretical model considering the typical tensile failure mode was employed to predict the bending–resisting capacities of the reinforced glulam beams. It is found that the reinforced glulam beams are featured with relatively ductile bending failure, compared to the brittle tensile failure of the unreinforced ones. Besides, the compressive properties of the uppermost grain of the glulam can be fully utilized in the CFRP-reinforced beams. For the beams with a 0.040% strengthening ratio, the bending–resisting capacity and the maximum deflection can be enhanced approximately by 6.51 and 12.02%, respectively. The difference between the experimental results and the numerical results and that between the experimental results and analytical results are within 20 and 10%, respectively.