Shear behavior of cross-laminated timber wall consisting of small panels

A cross-laminated timber (CLT) wall plays the role of resisting shear stress induced by lateral forces as well as vertical load. Due to the press size, CLT panels have a limitation in size. To minimize the initial investment, some glulam manufactures wanted to make a shear wall element with small-size CLT panels and panel-to-panel connections and wanted to know whether the shear wall would have equivalent shear performance with the wall made of a single CLT panel. In this study, this was investigated by experiments and kinematic model analysis. Two shear walls made of small CLT panels were tested. The model showed a good agreement with test results in the envelope curve. Even though the shear walls were made of small panels, the global peak load did not decrease significantly compared with the wall made of a single CLT panel, but the global displacement showed a large increase. From this analysis, it was concluded that the shear wall can be designed with small CLT panels, but displacement should be designed carefully.