Cyclic Behavior and Damage Assessment of Superelastic SMA Dowel Connections for Braced Timber Frame Applications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Braced timber frames (BTFs) are an efficient lateral force resisting system that can effectively resist wind and earthquake loads. It is well-known that the performance of BTFs is strongly dependent on connection behavior, but clear design guidelines are not available for detailing ductile BTFs. Furthermore, conventional connections with steel fasteners can exhibit significant stiffness and strength degradation under earthquake loads and result in large residual deformations. There is a need for more resilient energy-dissipating connections for BTFs and other mass timber systems. This study investigates the behavior of dowel-type and bolted wood-steel-wood connections with superelastic nickel-titanium (NiTi) shape memory alloy (SMA) fasteners. Under bending, the SMA fasteners are able to effectively recover their original shape with negligible residual deformation, even after undergoing large deflections. The SMA connections tested in this research showed significant potential for self-centering. Post-test autopsies of the connection test specimens showed ductile deformation mechanisms and similar levels of wood crushing between the steel and SMA fasteners under cyclic loading. However, the connection displacement ductility ratios of 4.6 and 6.2 observed with SMA fasteners is not sufficient to meet the requirement for moderately ductile frames. Additional research is required to better understand and characterize the behavior of SMA connections at the component and connection levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".