TITLE:
Serviceability Analysis of Non-Prismatic Timber Beams: Derivation and Validation of New and Effective Straightforward Formulas
AUTHORS:
Giuseppe Balduzzi, Georg Hochreiner, Josef Füssl, Ferdinando Auricchio
KEYWORDS:
Serviceability Analysis, Non-Prismatic Timber Beams, Tapered Beams, Pitched Beams, Maximal Displacements
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Civil Engineering,
Vol.7 No.1,
February
22,
2017
ABSTRACT: This paper provides innovative and effective instruments for the simplified analysis of serviceability limit states for pitched, kinked, and tapered GLT beams. Specifically, formulas for the evaluation of maximal horizontal and vertical displacements are derived from a recently-proposed Timoshenko-like non-prismatic beam model. Thereafter, the paper compares the proposed serviceability analysis formulas with other ones available in literature and with highly-refined 2D FE simulations in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed instruments. The proposed formulas lead to estimations that lie mainly on the conservative side and the errors are smaller than 10% (exceptionally up to 15%) in almost all of the cases of interest for practitioners. Conversely, the accuracy of the proposed formulas decreases for thick and highly-tapered beams since the beam model behind the proposed formulas cannot tackle local effects (like stress concentrations occurring at bearing and beam apex) that significantly influence the beam behavior for such geometries. Finally, the proposed formulas are more accurate than the ones available in literature since the latter ones often provide non-conservative estimations and errors greater than 20% (up to 120%).