Abstract
Strands produced from small-diameter timbers of lodgepole and ponderosa pine were used to fabricate a composite sandwich structure as a replacement for traditional building envelope materials, such as roofing. It is beneficial to develop models that are verified to predict the behavior of these sandwich structures under typical service loads. When used for building envelopes, these structural panels are subjected to bending due to wind, snow, live, and dead loads during their service life. The objective of this study was to develop a theoretical and a finite element (FE) model to evaluate the elastic bending behavior of the wood-strand composite sandwich panel with a biaxial corrugated core. The effect of shear deformation was shown to be negligible by applying two theoretical models, the Euler–Bernoulli and Timoshenko beam theories. Tensile tests were conducted to obtain the material properties as inputs into the models. Predicted bending stiffness of the sandwich panels using Euler-Bernoulli, Timoshenko, and FE models differed from the experimental results by 3.6%, 5.2%, and 6.5%, respectively. Using FE and theoretical models, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to explore the effect of change in bending stiffness due to intrinsic variation in material properties of the wood composite material.
Highlights
Increasing world population and limited natural resources require us to rethink how we utilize our forests more productively to construct effective building products for houses
All panels were manufactured to a target density of 640 kg/m3 in this study, since this density has been used for similar wood-strand products [11,12,13,14,18] and is a typical average density for commercially available oriented strand board (OSB) [20]
Theoretical and finite element models were developed and applied to predict the linear flexural behavior of the sandwich panel with a complex three-dimensional core geometry manufactured from small-diameter timber under a four-point bending load
Summary
Increasing world population and limited natural resources require us to rethink how we utilize our forests more productively to construct effective building products for houses. Forests play a critical role in sequestering carbon and building products and can further this cause by continuing to store the carbon for a prolonged period. A sustainable forest management plan to protect forests against fire, insects, and disease should consider thinning operations that result in improving forest health. Often, this requires the removal of small-diameter timber (SDT) at a cost and requires high-value markets or high-volume usage of these low-quality logs to recover the forest treatment costs. The average cost for a forest service thinning (approximately $70/dry ton) is usually more than the market value of the SDT removed
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