Macroscopic Model for Spatial Timber Plate Structures with Integral Mechanical Attachments

The use of integral mechanical attachments (IMAs) in spatial free-form timber plate structures has been revitalized by the production of engineered boards and recent developments in digital fabrication and computer-aided design. Despite the widespread interest in utilizing such structural systems, there have been very few efforts to develop modeling strategies that can be used by practitioners. Detailed finite-element (FE) models are typically computationally expensive and require advanced expertise. Accordingly, this paper introduces a simplified yet robust macroscopic modeling technique for spatial free-form timber plate structures with IMAs. This approach employs only beam and spring elements to simulate the structural behavior. The macromodel was introduced and the associated mechanical properties were computed. FE models constructed using shell elements and the results from recent experiments performed on a full-scale prototype were used to verify the proposed macromodel. The results showed that the response of the macromodel was closely in line with that of the experiments and FE models. Despite its simplicity, the macromodel is robust and can simulate the behavior of integrally attached timber plates. It was also demonstrated that the computational time for the macromodel is significantly less than the FE simulation.