About the steel dog-bones in wooden beams

With regard to steel structures, the connections with reduced beam section (RBS) have been studied over the last 20 years, both from an analytical point of view and from an experimental point of view. Several experimental tests demonstrated that RBS connections designed according to the most modern seismic codes are able to obtain the desired goal: the protection of the connection due to the yielding of the adjacent RBS. In this paper, the possibility of using a steel RBS in a wooden beam is investigated. The main difference with respect to the case of a steel beam is due the different shape of plastic domain for steel and wood. In addition, while in a steel beam the yielding of an intermediate point of the beam can be accepted, in the case of a wooden beam this possibility is to be prevented. Furthermore, the role that vertical loads can play and the possibility that the beam to column connections are realized with a partial strength connection are analyzed and accounted for. The final goal of this study is the setup of new procedure, for wooden beams, for accurately computing the relation between steel RBS location, vertical load and amount of section reduction for ensuring that plastic hinges develop only in the in the reduced sections, i.e. only in the steel sectio.