Plastic Design of Timber Concrete Composite Girders

This paper presents the results of tests conducted on glulam-concrete mixed structures with the goal to provide a plastic design method for multispan girders. Therefore, a new type of notch connectors has been developed. Compression tests on glulam timber samples have been conducted in order to develop a constitutive law considering the plastic behavior of glulam in compression. Full-sale tests on two multispan glulam-concrete composite girders have shown a highly plastic behavior of the system. However, further investigations are still undertaken to prove the existence of enough plastic rotation capacity in order to design such systems with a plastic-plastic approach.