A widely adopted connection for heavy timber structures is the one with slotted-in steel plates and steel dowels. Although this is a well-proven connection type, it presents some disadvantages, e.g. high degree of accuracy during the manufacture, significant environmental impact and limited fire resistance. In this paper, a new connection is proposed with the aim to reduce the disadvantages of the traditional connection with slotted-in steel plates and steel dowels are addressed by substituting steel components with wood products, i.e. birch plywood gusset plates and wood dowels..
Several investigations are available in the literature conducted with the main aim of reducing the use of steel in timber connections, (e.g., Xu et al, 2022; Furuheim & Nesse, 2020; Sandoli et al, 2023). Some studies propose new design methods for predicting both strength, stiffness and other mechanical properties of a connection consisting of wood as the only material.
What is missing is an extended database of experiments allowing to validate the mechanical models presented in literature. This paper is trying to cover these gaps with a series of experiments with birch plywood and different dowel type connectors: Laminated Densified Wood dowel; birch dowel; full-threaded screw.
Keywords: birch dowels, plywood, Laminated Densified Wood dowel
Authors
Roberto Tomasi
Norwegian University of Life Science, Norway
Marius Backe
Norwegian University of Life Science, Norway
Roberto Crocetti
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Anders Nyrud
Norwegian University of Life Science, Norway
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