Experimental assessment of the timber beam-to-column connections: The scaling effect

Abstract

To fully understand the behaviour of mass timber buildings, full-scale testing under different loading conditions may be required. Such experiments are quite rare as they are expensive and need large laboratory spaces. Therefore, tests are usually performed on scaled down systems. However, as it is known that size effects exist in timber, this paper investigates how accurately tests performed on scaled down timber systems can replicate the behaviour of the full-scale systems. The scaling effect on three types of timber beam-to-column connectors is experimentally investigated on full-scale and ¼-scale specimens. The shear and moment responses of the connectors are quantified, and their capacities are compared. Results show that the scaled down systems can reasonably replicate the behaviour of the full-scale systems, however the capacity observed in the scaled down tests is on average 20% higher than the capacity of the full-scale systems.