Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
This study examined the strength properties of a new timber connector that consisted of a sectioned steel tube embedded into the end grain of heavy-timber structural members using a vinyl-ester based mortar. The steel cap of the connector featured a threaded hole that allowed for the attachment of a variety of connecting steel elements.
The DOWEL program is a finite-element modeler for dowel-type connections (e.g. nails, bolts, lag screws) in wood-wood, wood-steel or any other type of connection material configuration. The underlying model has even been used for pile modeling in soil. It calculates load-displacement curves for monotonic and cyclic loading applictions and plots deformed shapes at predefined displacement steps. Material inputs consist of basic material embedment data. All material data is stored in a database that can be appended by the user.
This is a specialized dictionary for timber engineering terms in English and German. It currently contains approx. 1000 timber engineering and general engineering terms.
The objective of this study was to investigate the monotonic and cyclic behaviour of different kinds of slender dowel-type fasteners. To accomplish this, four types of fasteners were tested in a series of 73 monotonic and cyclic tests. All tests used either one or two slotted-in steel plates in PARALLAM®, a Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL) product.
This program allows the user to take an Excel spreadsheet with any type of calculation data (no matter how complex) and optimize a calculation outcome (e.g. total cost) using a Genetic Algorithm approach. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are based on biological principles of evolution and provide an interesting alternative to “classic” gradient-based optimization methods.