BENDING TESTS ON TIMBER CONCRETE COMPOSITES WITH PERFOBOND CONNECTIONS

Abstract

Long spans in timber concrete composites (TCC) is the next step of improvement that is ambitioned by the industry and designers for more efficient structures. With Perfobond connections, which are originally developed for steel-concrete composites (SCC) constructions, targeting longer spans in TCC is feasible. In this paper, full scale TCC beams are experimentally investigated under four point bending with the use of Perfobond connections. Two sets of experiments are performed with a variation of the concrete type (normal weight concrete vs lightweight concrete). The results indicate that the use of Perfobond connections lead to a linear behaviour until initial local damage. In specimens with lightweight concrete, failure in the most loaded connections is observed, however it did not lead to strength degradation. For specimens with normal weight concrete however, maximum load is obtained with the connection failure which led to significant cracking of timber under bending (tension side) and subsequently, the collapse of the TCC beam. As a result of this experimental campaign, a performant behaviour of the TCC beam implementing the Perfobond connections is observed and therefore, longer spans may be envisaged.