Mechanical properties of glulam beams made from different arrangements of layers and reinforced by steel rebars

The glued laminated beam is one of the useful engineered wood products for building constructions. The glulam beam can be used in design of the large-scale composite structures. The main concern about using glulam beams is their resistance, stiffness, and displacement. In this paper, glulam beams with different designs were reinforced with a rebar in bottom, top or both, and their mechanical properties were investigated using four-point bending tests. The test results showed that the ultimate loads of the reinforced beams increased compared to the unreinforced ones. The increasing of the maximum loads was 22% to 49% in the glulam beams with entire layers and 11-85% in the control glulam beams. The absorption of energy in the samples reinforced at the tensile and pressure parts is higher than the specimens only reinforced at the tensile part and the control ones. The amount of MOR depended on the type of reinforcement methods, originally. The reinforced control beams had a greater loss of MOE compared to the reinforced beams with entire layers. Also reinforcing resulted in a significant increase in the ductility of the beams reinforced in the tensile and pressure areas. Consequently, this is particularly important in the designing of the earthquake resistant beams.