Tensile Stiffness of Laminated Segment Timber

Laminated Segment Timber (LST) is an engineered wood product. It is panelshaped and glued of trapezoidal spruce lamellas. As intermediate product, it is provided for the processing to layered LST, a glulam-like building material. The source material for LST are mechanically graded logs. This study aims at developing modelling and simulation techniques to assess the mechanical properties of LST. It is reported about 294 nondestructive tensile tests on specimens from LST and about the corresponding results. Digital image correlation was used to examine the tensile stiffness. Both global and local stiffness of the LST specimens were analysed in terms of tensile MOE. It was found that the local MOE of modelling units for LST can be predicted by the dynamic MOE of the source material and a newly developed knot ratio referring to the cross-section of LST specimens. Using this correlation, two stiffness models were derived for the local MOE. Their response shows good agreement with that of reference models from the literature. The models are, therefore, suitable for incorporation into a layered LST finite element model which is intended for predicting the mechanical properties.