Monitoring the long-term behaviour of timber structures

Timber structures represent nowadays a significant part of our cultural heritage as well as an increasing market for individual buildings and large architectural and engineering projects. A lot of theoretical and experimental experiences exist at the material level, but a huge amount of parameters have to be investigated due to the singularity of wood behaviour. Therefore, some simplified behaviour models are usually proposed and validated through laboratory experiences, to be considered in design standards, but usually these studies remain at the material scale. The paper will first present and comment some experiences at the material scale to focus on those parameters having the greatest influence at the global structural level. The presence in European standards of coefficients or assumptions taking into account the described parameters will be underlined, when existent. In addition, material parameters as well as connection behaviour between structural elements and other materials have also a great impact on the global response. The gap between broadly available scientific results and the available information in European standards needs to be overcome with the integration of non-destructive testing (NDT)/monitoring techniques to measure the structural behaviour under in-service conditions and to understand how the material parameters influence the global response. Some case studies on NDT/monitoring of laboratory and in-field timber structures will be finally presented to show that data interpretation can easily become very difficult depending on the structural complexity, on the phenomenon to investigate as well as on the number of parameters to be measured. © 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.