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Perpendicular to grain and shear mechanical properties of veneer-based elements glued from single veneer sheets recovered from three species of juvenile subtropical hardwood plantation logs

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  • Qld Department of Agriculture and Fisheries
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This paper quantifies the mechanical properties perpendicular to the grain and in shear of glued rotary peeled veneers, as would be encountered in veneer-based structural products (i.e. by including both the effects of hot pressing the veneers and the glue used during the manufacturing process), of three species recovered from juvenile (early to mid-rotation) subtropical hardwood plantation logs. This underutilised resource has currently little to no commercial value in Australia but proven potential to produce attractive veneer-based structural products. Determining these unknown properties is important as they constitute essential input data to ultimately predict the behaviour and design properties of veneer-based structural products in cost-effective numerical simulations. Two species planted for solid timber end-products (Gympie messmate—Eucalyptus cloeziana and spotted gum—Corymbia citriodora) and one species traditionally grown for pulpwood (southern blue gum—Eucalyptus globulus) are considered in the paper. The dynamic modulus of elasticity, compressive and tensile strengths perpendicular to the grain of veneer-based elements, each manufactured from single veneer sheets, were experimentally measured and are analysed herein. These properties are found to have no to weak correlation to the parent veneer sheet dynamic modulus of elasticity parallel to the grain, a value which is commonly measured in line to grade veneers. The shear modulus (in the longitudinal-tangential plane), also referred to as “modulus of rigidity”, through-the-thickness and rolling shear strengths were also experimentally measured, and the results are discussed in the paper. Little to no correlation to the veneer sheet dynamic modulus of elasticity parallel to the grain was found for these properties. Weibull distributions are fitted to all test results and presented to probabilistically consider the investigated properties in numerical simulations of veneer-based structural products.
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European Journal of Wood and Wood Products (2018) 76:1637–1652
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00107-018-1350-8
ORIGINAL
Perpendicular tograin andshear mechanical properties ofveneer-
based elements glued fromsingle veneer sheets recovered fromthree
species ofjuvenile subtropical hardwood plantation logs
BenoitP.Gilbert1 · JulienM.Husson1· HenriBailleres2· RobertL.McGavin2· MaximeF.Fischer1
Received: 8 May 2018 / Published online: 20 September 2018
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract
This paper quantifies the mechanical properties perpendicular to the grain and in shear of glued rotary peeled veneers, as
would be encountered in veneer-based structural products (i.e. by including both the effects of hot pressing the veneers
and the glue used during the manufacturing process), of three species recovered from juvenile (early to mid-rotation) sub-
tropical hardwood plantation logs. This underutilised resource has currently little to no commercial value in Australia but
proven potential to produce attractive veneer-based structural products. Determining these unknown properties is important
as they constitute essential input data to ultimately predict the behaviour and design properties of veneer-based structural
products in cost-effective numerical simulations. Two species planted for solid timber end-products (Gympie messmate—
Eucalyptus cloeziana and spotted gum—Corymbia citriodora) and one species traditionally grown for pulpwood (southern
blue gum—Eucalyptus globulus) are considered in the paper. The dynamic modulus of elasticity, compressive and tensile
strengths perpendicular to the grain of veneer-based elements, each manufactured from single veneer sheets, were experi-
mentally measured and are analysed herein. These properties are found to have no to weak correlation to the parent veneer
sheet dynamic modulus of elasticity parallel to the grain, a value which is commonly measured in line to grade veneers. The
shear modulus (in the longitudinal-tangential plane), also referred to as “modulus of rigidity”, through-the-thickness and
rolling shear strengths were also experimentally measured, and the results are discussed in the paper. Little to no correlation
to the veneer sheet dynamic modulus of elasticity parallel to the grain was found for these properties. Weibull distributions
are fitted to all test results and presented to probabilistically consider the investigated properties in numerical simulations
of veneer-based structural products.
1 Introduction
When a manufacturer of engineered wood products wishes
to introduce new veneer-based structural products on the
market, such as those manufactured from new timber species
(Boughton and Crews 2013) or from an optimisation strategy
of the existing veneered stock, an experimental campaign
must be undertaken. The campaign aims at determining the
strength and stiffness distributions of the new products and
ultimately derive the design properties. A minimum of 30
and 32 tests per design property is required in the Australian/
New-Zealand (AS/NZS 2269.1 2012; AS/NZS 4357.2 2006)
and European (EN 1058 2009) standards, respectively. A
costly trial-and-error procedure may therefore be needed to
achieve targeted design properties.
Nevertheless, to efficiently determine and optimise
the mechanical properties of new veneer-based structural
products, numerical models which aim at determining the
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this
article (https ://doi.org/10.1007/s0010 7-018-1350-8) contains
supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Benoit P. Gilbert
b.gilbert@griffith.edu.au
Henri Bailleres
henri.bailleres@daf.qld.gov.au
Robert L. McGavin
robbie.mcgavin@daf.qld.gov.au
1 School ofEngineering andBuilt Environment, Griffith
University, GoldCoast, QLD4222, Australia
2 Salisbury Research Facility, Queensland Government,
Salisbury, QLD4107, Australia
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... Other properties were taken from the literature, either for Gympie messmate (when available) or for hardwood species of similar density. Specifically, the MOE in the radial ER and tangential ET directions, and the shear modulus in the longitudinal-radial GLR and longitudinal-tangential GLT planes were taken as the typical values encountered for juvenile Gympie messmate [28]. Note that these values were shown to be uncorrelated to EL [28] and were herein assumed as constants. ...
... Specifically, the MOE in the radial ER and tangential ET directions, and the shear modulus in the longitudinal-radial GLR and longitudinal-tangential GLT planes were taken as the typical values encountered for juvenile Gympie messmate [28]. Note that these values were shown to be uncorrelated to EL [28] and were herein assumed as constants. The shear modulus in the radial-tangential GRT plane and the Poisson ratios γLR, γLT, γRT were taken for species of similar density in [29]. ...
... The shear strengths in the longitudinal-radial fs,LR and longitudinal-tangential fs,LT planes were taken as the median value measured for the 145 mm diameter CHS in [2] (rounded to the closest integer). The rolling shear strength fs,RT was taken as the 50 th percentile value measured in [28] on the same resources used in manufacturing the CHS. Table 4 summarises all tensile and shear strength values used. ...
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... Unlike plywood products, which have alternate cross-laminated veneers (Walker 2006), LVL-C that is usually manufactured with one-fifth of veneers glued crosswise was proposed to overcome the low mechanical properties perpendicular to the grain typically encountered in LVL, resulting in the possibility of premature splitting failure in structural connections (Kobel et al. 2014). Especially, relevant to this study, low tension perpendicular to the grain capacity (about 1.0 to1.5 MPa) were reported for VBP manufactured from small-diameter plantation-grown SPG logs (Gilbert et al. 2018a). ...
... Tensile strength perpendicular to the grain The tensile strength perpendicular to the grain was determined following the configuration in the ASTM D143-14 (2014) that was developed for solid timber specimens. The procedure was successfully adopted in the literature to LVL samples (Ardalany et al. 2011;Gilbert et al. 2018a). Three samples were cut per panel to the dimensions given in Fig. 3a. ...
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... Guo and Altaner [4] combined rotary peeled veneer of eucalyptus (hardwood) and radiata pine (softwood) to examine the effect of growth-strain on the mechanical behaviour of hybrid LVLs. Gilbert et al. [5] explored the suitability of using juvenile wood from three different hardwood species. Other studies on mechanical properties of LVL examine the influence of veneer thickness [6][7][8], the proportion of juvenile wood [7], orientation of loose (the side with lathe checks) and tight side of the veneers [7,9], the effect of loading directions [10], the bonding quality at the veneer interface [6] and knot proportions within the veneers [8]. ...
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