Self-centring bracing system: avoidance of elastic buckling for braces with one intermediate damper

Abstract

Today, more attention is being given to timber material by practitioners as a structural member owing to benefits that this material can offer such as high strength to weight ratio, being environmentally friendly and sustainable resources. The self-centring timber brace can be an efficient lateral load resisting system for the growing timber industry as they can provide energy dissipation and self-centring characteristic while they can also offer a high elastic stiffness. This paper investigates the cyclic performance of a self-centring timber brace that utilizes the Resilient Slip Friction Joint (RSFJ) for energy dissipation as the end connection. Past studies have shown that this brace is prone to a damage-free lateral instability, which may result in the reduction of the brace capacity in compression. In this paper, a new telescopic mechanism is introduced and tested to avoid the elastic buckling, entitled Anti-Buckling Tubes (ABT) whose performance is experimentally verified through a full-scale quasi-static test.