Experimental Investigation on the Thermo-Mechanical Properties of Wood Concerning Compression with Thermal Creep Tests

Within the research project “Mechanical properties of wood for fire design”, conducted at ETH Zurich, the Technical University of Munich, and TALTEC University, the thermomechanical properties of timber exposed to fire are investigated as the basis for revising the design methods in EN 1995-1-2. The project includes full-scale fire tests on timber members, numerical examinations, and small-scale experiments under elevated temperatures. The small-scale experiments aim to investigate whether a correlation exists between the behaviour of timber members exposed to fire and exposure to elevated temperatures without direct fire exposure. The following report focuses on the experimental investigations of the small-scale experiments. While EN 408 provides a framework for determining wood's physical and mechanical properties under standard conditions, this series of experiments introduces an additional temperature exposure to simulate increasing material temperatures inside timber members during fires. This series of experiments investigates how elevated temperatures affect the mechanical properties of wood, including strength and elasticity, when the wood is subjected to compression stress.