Probabilistic design of adhesively bonded timber joints.

The use of adhesive bonding in structural timber engineering is limited to the production of laminated wood and the toughening of existing structures. To use adhesives as an alternative to mechanical fasteners, an accurate and reliable design method has to be developed. Characteristic material properties of wood such as anisotropy, large scattering of mechanical values and brittle failure complicate the capacity prediction of bonded joints. A deterministic approach is not able to deal with the stress peaks inside the joints. With the probabilistic concept, an alternative solution is presented, which allows for a strength prediction under consideration of the complex stress distributions and the stress peaks in the joint, as well as the scatterings of the mechanical properties of the material. Adhesively bonded double lap joints were investigated both experimentally and numerically under consideration of various parameters such as overlap length, adhesive layer thickness and type of adhesive. The probabilistic design method was applied and good agreement between experimental and theoretical failure loads was obtained. The proposed method has immediate actionable application for the dimensioning of adhesively bonded timber joints.