MODELLING OF COLUMN BASE FOR TRADITIONAL TIMBER BUILDINGS BASED ON LOCAL COMPRESSION EXPERIMENTS AT CONTACT SURFACE BETWEEN COLUMN BASE AND FOUNDATION STONE

Abstract

We propose a technique for obtaining the skeleton curve of moment-rotation relation at the column base of traditional timber buildings form local compression tests of wood elements. In the local compression experiment, a rotated wood specimen is pressed into foundation stone keeping the rotation angle constant. From this experiment, we obtain the relationships between the amount of reaction force from the foundation stone and its acting position for the specified rotation angle. Noting that the moment at the column base can be expressed by multiplying the amount of the reaction force and its position of action, we can predict the moment-rotation angle relationship at the column base from a set of the local compression tests, where the rotation angle is changed as an experimental parameter. The proposed approach was verified by comparing the estimation with the results of horizontal cyclic loading test under a constant axial force. The size effect was also studied in the cyclic loading test.