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Dowel-type connections are commonly used in timber engineering for a large range of structural applications. The current generation of design rules is largely based on empiricism and testing and lacks in many parts a stringent mechanical foundation. This often blocks an optimized use of the connections, which is essential for the design of economically efficient structures. Moreover, it severely limits the applicability of the design rule, such as restrictions regarding splitting behavior or maximum ductility (e.g. maximum allowable deformations) are missing. Therefore, the demands due to a large and quickly evolving variety of structural designs in timber engineering are not reflected.The aim of this work is to study the load-carrying behavior of the connection in detail, including all loading stages, from the initial contact between dowel and wood up to the ultimate load and failure. Distinct features during first loading as well as during unloading and reloading cycles are identified and discussed. The knowledge of the detailed load-carrying behavior is essential to understanding the effects of individual parameters varied in relation to the material and the connections design. The suitability of the current design rules laid down in Eurocode 5 (EC5) is assessed and deficiencies revealed.Tests on 64 steel-to-timber dowel-type connections loaded parallel to the fiber direction were performed. The connections were single-dowel connec- tions with dowels of twelve millimeter diameter. The test specimens varied in wood density and geometric properties. Additionally, the effects of dowel roughness and lateral reinforcement were assessed. The experiments confirmed that connections of higher density show significantly higher ultimate loads and clearly evidenced that they are more prone to brittle failure than connections using light wood. The latter usually exhibit a ductile behavior with an extensive yield plateau until final failure occurs. With increased dowel roughness, both, ultimate load and ductility are increased.The test results are compared with corresponding design values given by EC5 for the strength and the stiffness of the respective single-dowel connections. For connections of intermediate slenderness, EC5 provided conservative design values for strength. Nevertheless, in some of the experiments the design values overestimated the actual strengths considerably in connections of low as well as high slenderness. As for the stiffness, a differentiation according to the connection width is missing, which gives useful results only for intermediate widths.Furthermore, the test results constitute valuable reference data for validating numerical simulation tools, which are currently a broad field of intensive interest.Keywords: dowel-type timber connections, Johansen theory, uniaxial tension tests on connections, ductile and brittle failure modes, influence of density, connection design and dowel roughness, comparison with design rules in Eurocode 5

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The meshless local Petrov-Galerkin method is used to analyze transient heat conduction in 3-D axisymmetric solids with continuously inhomogeneous and anisotropic material properties. A 3-D axisymmetric body is created by rotation of a cross section around an axis of symmetry. Axial symmetry of geometry and boundary conditions reduces the original 3-D boundary value problem into a 2-D problem. The cross section is covered by small circular subdomains surrounding nodes randomly spread over the analyzed domain. A unit step function is chosen as test function, in order to derive local integral equations on the boundaries of the chosen subdomains, called local boundary integral equations. These integral formulations are either based on the Laplace transform technique or the time difference approach. The local integral equations are nonsingular and take a very simple form, despite of inhomogeneous and anisotropic material behavior across the analyzed structure. Spatial variation of the temperature and heat flux (or of their Laplace transforms) at discrete time instants are approximated on the local boundary and in the interior of the subdomain by means of the moving least-squares method. The Stehfest algorithm is applied for the numerical Laplace inversion, in order to retrieve the time-dependent solutions.