Experimental studies on timber beam connections with glued-in fiber reinforced plates

This work presents an experimental campaign aimed at characterizing the response of different joint typologies reinforced with glued-in fiber reinforced sheets. The testing program was intended as a preliminary study to assess the possibilities of these solutions and to offer a contribution for future design codes development. Testing was performed on full-scale specimens covering a wide range of typologies and included as well a series of connections with glued-in steel reinforcement that could be compared to corresponding FRP solutions. In general, FRP connections were more deformable but showed good capacity when the characteristics of the material were properly exploited. The ultimate behavior for monotonically increasing load has been also observed and some indications for improvements were obtained.