Joint properties and earthquake behaviour of buildings made from dowel-laminated timber

Dowel-laminated timber (DLT) elements consist of lamellae arranged side-by-side that are connected with beech dowels. Due to the glue-free DLT element layup, joints and shear walls potentially suffer from considerable reduction of stiffness and load carrying capacity as fasteners inserted perpendicular to the element plane may be placed in gaps between the single lamellae. Tests on joints showed that, depending on the fastener diameter, the remaining load carrying capacity of joints in DLT in comparison to joints in solid wood may be only 25%. Monotonic and quasi-static reversed cyclic tests on DLT shear walls demonstrated that the DLT construction typology has stiffness, load carrying capacities and energy dissipation proper-ties similar to traditional timber frame constructions. Via lumped-mass models of a typical residential building whose hys-teretic behaviour has been assigned to nonlinear hysteretic springs, a preliminary action reduction factor (ARF) has been derived. The springs have been calibrated using the test results of shear walls. The modelling outcomes have been compared to other timber construction typologies. Preliminary ARFs for DLT buildings resulted to 3 and are similar to those of the other typologies.