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Since wood products for structural elements, especially cross-laminated timber (CLT), have gained importance in the building sector, the need for appropriate and reliable design codes for such wood products has become essential. For the improvement and development of design concepts, a profound knowledge about the mechanical behaviour of these products is necessary. For this reason, this work focuses on global failure mechanisms and the corresponding evolution of different crack modes in CLT plates, depending on geometric and/or material related properties. Therefore, plate-bending experiments on three-and five-layered CLT plates were carried out. In addition to standard evaluation methods, each specimen was cut into small cubes to identify the failure modes inside the plates. Regions with dominant shear failure, tensile failure, delamination and mixed failure modes could be captured and connected to geometry and loading situation. Based on this evaluation, well-known but not yet in detail described effects, such as the ductile structural behaviour of CLT plates, can be explained. Moreover, the evolution of rolling shear failure modes as well as from which point the progressive failure highly affects the plate stiffness is investigated and analysed in detail.

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Although cross-laminated timber (CLT) plates are increasingly used in high-performance building structures, a tailored composition of them or, at least, a performance-based classification scheme is not available. Especially, the influence of the quality of the 'raw' material (wooden boards) on the load carrying capacity of CLT elements is hardly investigated yet. For this reason, within this work, bending tests on 24 CLT plates consisting of wooden boards from three different strength classes have been carried out. The global mechanical response as well as the formation of failure mechanisms were investigated, including a full-field deformation measurement system, which allowed for a qualitatively as well as quantitatively identification of board failure modes. Interestingly, no influence of the board strength class on the elastic limit load of the CLT plates was observed, but the situation was different for the load displacement history beyond the elastic regime, where basically, two different global failure mechanisms could be distinguished. The obtained knowledge about the 'post-elastic' behaviour of CLT plates may serve as a basis for the optimisation of CLT products and the development or improvement of design concepts, respectively. Moreover, the obtained large 'post-elastic' capacity reserve of CLT consisting of high quality boards could lead to a better utilisation of the raw material.

In this paper, the influence of the variable axial force and of the Secondary Torsion-Moment Deformation-Effect (STMDE) on the deformations of beams due to torsional warping is investigated. The investigation is based on the second-order torsional warping theory of doubly symmetric beams with thin-walled open or closed cross-sections. The effect of the axial force on the torsional stiffness of thinwalled beams is considered according to the second-order torsional warping theory. The solutions of the underlying differential equations are used for setting up the relations, needed for application of the transfer matrix method. They are derived, considering both static and dynamic action. This enables stablishing the local