Estimation of Flexural Tensile Strength as a Function of Shear of Timber Structures

To avoid the intrinsic difficulties regarding the characterization of wood (i.e., different applications in different directions), various normative documents present the relationships between properties; the Brazilian standard is of particular interest in this regard, because Brazil has a huge diversity of tree species from tropical forests, usually used in construction. In view of this, this research aimed to propose a new list of properties to be inserted in future versions of the Brazilian standards in order to help identify the species shear strength. It is expected that there is a correlation between the characteristic values of flexural strength (f_m,k) and shear strength in the direction parallel to the wood fibers (f_v,0,k), leading to models that make it possible to estimate one of the properties if the other is known, which was the main objective of this research. After finding a strong correlation between the properties, various regression models were evaluated. It can be concluded that the linear model composed only by the angular coefficient (equation with only one variable) presented a determination coefficient of 76.45%, which shows the good precision achieved in the estimation of one of the two variables compared if the other is known. Additionally, an attempt was made to define which probability distribution represents the resistance data by applying maximum likelihood (MLE), concluding that there is little difference between the representation by the normal distribution and the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. Another approach was to define the undermining coefficient to ensure the reliability of the prediction equation by the experiment-based calibration methodology defined by Eurocode.