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Experimental and Parametric Studies on Douglas-fir CLT Shear Walls with High Capacity Connections

By Minghao Li, Benjamin Moerman and Thomas Wright, July 2021.

Download SWP-T128 (pdf)

Executive summary

As an engineered timber product, cross-laminated timber (CLT) is currently gaining popularity around the world including New Zealand and Australia. Compared with Radiata pine, Douglas-fir is underutilised in the New Zealand construction market. However, Douglas-fir has a great potential to be manufactured into high value added CLT products for mass timber construction. To help engineers specify Douglas-fir CLT in building construction, a series of research projects funded by SWP research partnership are conducted to establish critical engineering design properties of Douglas-fir CLT and develop high performance Douglas-fir CLT connections and structural systems for resilient seismic design. This two-year project aims to develop multi-storey Douglas-fir CLT shear wall structures that have high strength and stiffness and are suitable for high seismic countries like New Zealand. This report mainly presents preliminary results of two connection types that are critical for the Douglas-fir CLT shear walls. The first connection type is the steel-CLT connections to connect steel link beams to CLT wall panels in a coupled CLT shear wall system. The second connection type is the screwed hold-down connections that can provide wall anchoring under earthquake loads.

The experimental results demonstrated excellent connection behaviour and the research findings have been used to optimize the connection details in the Douglas-fir CLT wall tests in the following project phase.

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