Scholarly record

FOUNDAMENTAL STUDY FOR DESIGN OF HYBRID WOOD LAMINATED GLUED CROSS-SECTIONS (HyW-GLT) WITH IMPROVED PERFORMANCE UNDER LOADING

Aurelian Gruin

Abstract

Together with clay and rocks, wood represents the oldest building material, used for developing the overall infrastructure, namely civil structures, road and bridge elements. Its use as critical building material is still wide spread worldwide, due to intrinsic qualities of wood as building material and also due to its availability, being generously offered by nature. Romania, despite of huge lacks of legislation and practical protection of forests and wood as strategic resource, still has important, high quality, wood reserves. Nevertheless, their protection in terms of rational, sustainable exploitation, represents the nowadays ?Must!?, completed by general interest of optimising the design and the overall behaviour of new or old, wooden or composite (wood included), structures. In order to counteract the big vulnerabilities of wooden structures, namely the lack of material homogeneity and the high material sensitivity to environmental conditions (temperature and relative humidity), new techniques were worldwide established for controlling and optimising the general behaviour of structural wood, green or dried. Glued laminated Timber (GLT) and cross laminated timber (CLT) [1], [2] were developed, for better control on overall performance of wooden mass, possibility of flaws removal from the massive, solid wooden plank, if necessary, and increase of cross-section efficiency under loading. Further optimising of the structural laminated wooden glued cross-section included the concept of using different wood type lamellas in the same cross-section (soft or hard wood), distributed in accordance to the loading system and the derived stress distribution, depending on the specific structural use of the element (the hybrid lamellas concept - HyW-GLT) [3]. This paper offers a general overview regarding the opportunity and benefits of the fundamental research on wood and wooden structures, in relation with the general scientific progress that generates superior, innovative solutions for optimal use of natural, limited resources and also offer pertinent alternatives to the present methods. Preliminary experimental testing for evaluation of wooden elements behaviour (massive and laminated glued sections (GLT) beams,) when subjected to extreme environmental changes, are presented, as background for future research in the specified topic.

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