Prediction of compressive strength of cross-laminated timber panel

Compressive strength of cross-laminated timber (CLT) is one of the important mechanical properties which should be considered especially in design of mid-rise CLT building because it works to resist a vertical bearing load from the upper storeys. The CLT panel can be manufactured in various combinations of the grade and dimension of lamina. This leads to the fact that an experimental approach to evaluate the strength of CLT would be expensive and time-demanding. In this paper, lamina property-based models for predicting the compressive strength of CLT panel was studied. A Monte Carlo simulation was applied for the model prediction. A set of experimental compression tests on CLT panel (short column) was conducted to validate the model and it shows good results. Using this model, the influence of the lamina's width on the CLT compressive strength was investigated. It reveals that the CLT compressive strength increases with the increase in the number of lamina. It was thought that repetitive member effect (or dispersion effect) is applicable for the CLT panel, which was explained by the decrease of the variation in strength. This dependency of the number of lamina needs further study in development of reference design values, CLT wall design and CLT manufacturing.