Experimental study on strength and stiffness connection of wooden truss structure

Abstract

Scarcity of wood is hindering the use of wood materials that have large dimension and high quality. Thus, wooden truss is expected to be a solution for this problem. However, the use of this system is not complemented with adequate research of its strength and behavior. In this study, wooden truss would be examined experimentally. The specimen is a wooden truss joist supporting the floor slab for typical residences with two connection type variations which are nail and glue. These specimens has dimension of 185 cm in length and 36 cm in height with 3 layers of a wooden board in width, and were produced by using Sengon wood with elasticity modulus of 2867 MPa, and specific gravity of 0.4. Destructive and non-destructive test were performed. From the result, we obtained a higher proportional strength for glue type connection truss which at 1123.34 kg compared to nail type connection truss which at 767.07 kg. However, unlike the nail type connection, the glue type connection has a brittle behavior. Moreover, the stiffness connection study resulted with partial fixity value of 0.07 for nail type and 0.98 for glue type connection. Furthermore, these results have also been validated using numerical model analysis