Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a relatively new engineered wood for timber construction. It is a great shear wall material. It was known that the shear performance of the CLT wall depends on the performance of connections. In connection, nail or screw has to be installed with a certain distance from the end of the timber. Current building code specifies the distance on the name of end distance. The end distance was decided as a minimum distance not to make splitting or tearing out in lumber or glued laminated timber. As a relatively new engineered wood, the end distance of CLT connection need to be identified because CLT is cross-wisely glued lumber products like plywood. Different from glued laminated timber or lumber, cross layer of CLT may prevent wood from splitting or tearing-out. As a result, the end distance of CLT was expected to be reduced than glued laminated timber. The shorter end distance may let more versatile connector design possible. In this study, prior to developing novel connection for CLT, the end distance of CLT connection was experimentally investigated to identify the end distance limitation. The experiments showed that the end distance can be reduced from 7D to 6D, in case of the tested CLT combination and screw in this study.
Compressive strength of cross-laminated timber (CLT) is one of the important mechanical properties which should be considered especially in design of mid-rise CLT building because it works to resist a vertical bearing load from the upper storeys. The CLT panel can be manufactured in various combinations of the grade and dimension of lamina. This leads to the fact that an experimental approach to evaluate the strength of CLT would be expensive and time-demanding. In this paper, lamina property-based models for predicting the compressive strength of CLT panel was studied. A Monte Carlo simulation was applied for the model prediction. A set of experimental compression tests on CLT panel (short column) was conducted to validate the model and it shows good results. Using this model, the influence of the lamina’s width on the CLT compressive strength was investigated. It reveals that the CLT compressive strength increases with the increase in the number of lamina. It was thought that repetitive member effect (or dispersion effect) is applicable for the CLT panel, which was explained by the decrease of the variation in strength. This dependency of the number of lamina needs further study in development of reference design values, CLT wall design and CLT manufacturing.
A cross-laminated timber (CLT) wall plays a role of resisting shear stress induced by lateral forces as well as resisting vertical load. Due to the press size, CLT panels have a limitation in its size. To minimize the initial investment, some glulam manufactures wanted to make a shear wall element with small-size CLT panels and panel-to-panel...
A cross-laminated timber (CLT) wall plays the role of resisting shear stress induced by lateral forces as well as vertical load. Due to the press size, CLT panels have a limitation in size. To minimize the initial investment, some glulam manufactures wanted to make a shear wall element with small-size CLT panels and panel-to-panel connections and wanted to know whether the shear wall would have equivalent shear performance with the wall made of a single CLT panel. In this study, this was investigated by experiments and kinematic model analysis. Two shear walls made of small CLT panels were tested. The model showed a good agreement with test results in the envelope curve. Even though the shear walls were made of small panels, the global peak load did not decrease significantly compared with the wall made of a single CLT panel, but the global displacement showed a large increase. From this analysis, it was concluded that the shear wall can be designed with small CLT panels, but displacement should be designed carefully.
The aim of this study was to develop a stochastic model for predicting the bending strength distribution of glued-laminated timber (GLT). The developed model required the localized modulus of elasticity (MOE) and tensile strengths of laminae as input properties. The tensile strength was estimated using a regression model based on the localized MOEs and knot area ratios (KAR) which were experimentally measured for lamina grades samples. The localized MOE was obtained using a machine stress-rated grader, and the localized KAR was determined using an image-processing system. The bending strength distributions in four types of GLTs were simulated using the developed GLT beam model; these four types included: (1) GLT beams without finger joints; (2) GLT beams with finger joints; (3) GLT beams with different lamina sizes; and (4) GLT beams with different combinations of lamina grades. The simulated bending strength distributions were compared with actual test data of 2.4 and 4.8 m-long GLTs. The Kolmogorov–Smirnov goodness-of-fit tests showed that all of the simulated bending strength distributions agreed well with the test data. Especially, good agreement was shown in the fifth percentile point estimate of bending strength with the difference of approximately 1%.