Timber-Concrete Composite Systems with Ductile Connections

Although concrete in compression and wood in flexural tension are both intrinsically brittle, composite beams made of these two materials can develop a reliable measure of softening before failure when ductile shear connectors are used to link concrete and wood, provided the connectors are dimensioned to yield before failure of wood or concrete. This article describes an analytical method for predicting the complete load-deflection response of timber/concrete composite beams with ductile shear connectors. The approach involves the superposition of results obtained from a series of linear models, each of which has a progressively smaller number of connectors corresponding to the order in which they yield. The nonlinear behavior of the system can thus be determined without iteration using only linear computations. The analytical method is validated against experimental data.