Abstract

Timber structures have many advantages,such as eco-friendliness,high stiffness-to-weight ratio and easy assembling,and are widely used around the world.Natural disasters,such as earthquake,will cause damage in structures.Understanding the mechanical properties of timber members and connections and their hysteretic behavior is crucial to behavior analysis and prediction of timber structures under earthquakes.

Recently,continuum damage mechanics has been successfully adopted to predict the mechanical behavior of wood[1-6].However,little research has been taken on the hysteretic behavior of wood.Dinwoodie[7]provided that the tensile strength would loss 6%～15.3%if wood had been compressed to the max compress stress.However,no detailed results of the stress and strains were reported.

This paper focuses on the experimental and numerical analysis of the mechanical behavior of timber under cyclic loading in the parallel-to-grain direction.