Investigation on Elements Presenting Cracks in Timber Structures

The increasing number of wood structure amongst large and potentially public buildings gave a new impulse to the assessment of timber structures. For assessing the state of timber elements, cracks are a key indicator. However, no standard currently provides methods to evaluate the impact of these cracks. Therefore, an investigation to gather information about the most frequent characteristics of cracked timber structures has been carried out. This investigation provides the main characteristics of both the timber elements and the crack distributions encountered. These main characteristics have then been used to define a numerical model in order to investigate the impact of cracks on the stiffness and load-carrying capacity of timber beams. Based on these results, a model has been developed to calculate the reduction of the global beam stiffness.