Edinburgh Napier University

  Timber has been used as a structural material for many centuries and a renewed interest in (and calls for) a greater use in construction is now observed. This has been mostly the result of an increasingly wider body of literature claiming the superior environmental benefits of timber (especially in terms of embodied greenhouse gas emissions) sourced from sustainably managed forests. The development of innovative manufacturing processes, such as glue lamination and cross lamination, has allowed in the last decades to produce a variety on wooden-based products, which maintain the main advantages of timber for structural use (e.g., high strength to weight ratio) while at the same time reducing the inherent limitations of solid timber in terms of maximum sizes and natural defects. An overview of the mechanical properties of structural timber and related products is given in this chapter, along with relevant information on how these properties are affected by environmental conditions, and how these aspects are dealt with during design. The main reference standard for the design of timber structures is the Eurocode 5 (BS EN 1995) and it represents the basis of this chapter. An introduction and explanation of rules for the design of common structural elements such as beams and columns, is therefore provided. This is then followed by design rules for timber connections and rules for the design of composite systems such as thin webbed sections and thin flanges sections. The Concluding section recapitulates the main topics touched in this chapter.