Relationships between stiffness of material, lamellas and CLT elements with respect to out of plane bending and rolling shear

The use of cross laminated timber (CLT) for construction has increased greatly in recent years and the large volumes ofwood used for CLT means that it is important to optimize the use of the material. This requires relevant grading of lamellasand knowledge of relationships between lamella and CLT properties. In the present study, the relationship between dynamicaxial modulus of elasticity (MoE) of lamellas and the quasi-static out of plane bending stiffness of CLT is investigated. Bymeans of four-point bending test, it is shown that the effective quasi-static MoE of lamellas in CLT is only 2–6% lower thanthe average axial dynamic MoE of the individual lamellas. With this knowledge, producers of CLT can easily predict andcontrol the important out of plane bending stiffness of the produced CLT. Moreover, it is shown that effective rolling shearstiffness of layers in CLT can be accurately determined by means of digital image correlation performed in connection tofour-point bending of CLT, even for long test spans. For layers of lamellas of Scots pine of size 40 × 190 mm2the averageapparent or effective rolling shear modulus was determined to be 159 MPa. The average rolling shear modulus of the samematerial was determined to be 56 MPa