Wood Design Focus Online - Forest Products Society

Wood Design Focus Online, published quarterly by the Forest Products Society, provides a communications update for design professionals, architects, educators, researchers, building code officials, and manufacturers and users of engineered wood products.

Each issue of Wood Design Focus Online features a special "Focus" section that presents technical papers on a particular aspect of wood engineering and a list of related literature and resources, as well as articles highlighting innovations in contemporary engineered wood construction.

Featured in Summer issue:

I-Joist Diaphragm Systems: Performance Trends Observed with Full-Scale Testing
by Ned Waltz and J. Daniel Dolan

Pre-fabricated wood I-joists are routinely used to construct roof and floor systems in modern light- frame wood construction. One of the primary func- tions of a light-frame floor or roof is to serve as a dia- phragm that collects in-plane lateral load and trans- fers it to the shear walls and foundation elements. Since the existing diaphragm design provisions con-tained within the model building codes are based on a combination of testing and analysis conducted with sawn lumber framing, designers often question whether they can be reasonably applied to dia- phragms framed with I-joists. This article summarizes some of the rationalization and limitations associated with I-joist framing for diaphragm construction. Per- formance trends and observations are presented based on one manufacturer’s experience with 41 full- scale I-joist diaphragm tests conducted in accordance with ASTM E455 (ASTM 2004). View FREE article

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The global network for forest products professionals

Founded in 1947, the Forest Products Society’s mission is to foster innovation and research in the environmentally sound processing and use of wood and fiber resources by disseminating information and providing forums for networking and the exchange of knowledge.