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Duration-of-load and creep effects in thick MPB strand based wood composite

University of British Columbia

British Columbia (BC) is in the midst of the largest outbreak of the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) ever recorded in western Canada. Technologies capable of converting stained lumber into market acceptable products are urgently required to reduce the impact of the growing volume of MPB killed lumber on the profitability of forestry in BC. New, thick MPB strand-based structural composite products can be produced and help absorb a large volume of MPB wood. With appropriate mechanical properties, such products can be used as beams, headers, and columns in the low-rise commercial, multi-family residential and single family residential markets. This work was focused on the duration-load and creep behaviour of thick MPB strand-based wood composite. The beam specimens were made in the Timber Engineering and Applied Mechanics Laboratory at UBC. A series of tests were conducted on the matched groups to investigate the creep-rupture behaviour. These investigations comprised of ramp load tests at three loading rates, long-term constant load tests at two stress levels and cyclic bending tests at six stress levels. A damage accumulation model was developed to study the creep-rupture behaviour. This model stipulates that the rate of damage growth is given in terms of the current strain rate and the previously accumulated damage, and a 5-parameter rheological model is applied to describe the viscoelastic constitutive relationship to represent the time-dependent strain, while the damage accumulation law acts as the failure criterion. The results of the long-term constant load tests were then interpreted by means of the creep-rupture model which had been shown to be able to represent the time-dependent deflection and time-to-failure data for different stress levels. The predictions of the model were verified using results from ramp load tests at different loading rates and results from cyclic loading tests at different stress levels. The creep-rupture model incorporates the short term strength of the material, the load history and predicts the deflection history as well as the time-to-failure. As it is a probabilistic model, it allows its incorporation into a time-reliability study of wood composites’ applications.

Text

2010-04-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/23906

Forestry

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/