Abstract
Parallel strand lumber (PSL) is a composite made of oriented wood strands that have been glued and compressed together. Its market share in the residential construction industry is considerable, being used primarily as main load bearing members such as beams and columns. Unlike the fast-paced market growth of these products, computational development has been slow. The highly heterogeneous mesostructure of this material must be known and quantified in order to develop advanced computational tools for limit state analysis of PSL. Void heterogeneities play an important role in determining the failure modes and strength of PSL, in addition to material phase aberrations such as grain angle variations and defects. In this study, two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) void characteristics were investigated. An experimental program along with a statistical survey was conducted to quantify the following 2D and 3D void characteristics in two PSL billets: volume fraction, volume, alignment, and moments of inertia of voids, as well as second moment properties, lineal path function, and chord length functions of the two phase mesostructure. As expected, most of the voids lie on the longitudinal direction of the specimen and have approximately an ellipsoidal shape. Based on this shape data, the characteristics of the ellipsoids that best fit the voids were calculated. Using the statistical data of the fitted ellipsoids, a random field of virtual ellipsoidal voids to simulate the mesostructure of PSL was generated.
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References
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 27 • Issue 6 • June 2015
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 29, 2013
Accepted: Apr 28, 2014
Published online: Aug 12, 2014
Discussion open until: Jan 12, 2015
Published in print: Jun 1, 2015
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