Determination of the elastic and stiffness characteristics of cross-laminated timber plates from flexural wave velocity measurements

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is an engineered wood with good structural properties and it is also economically competitive with the traditional building construction materials. However, due to its low volume density combined with its high stiffness, it does not provide sufficient sound insulation, thus it is necessary to develop specific acoustic treatments in order to increase the noise reduction performance. The material's mechanical properties are required as input data to perform the vibro-acoustic analyses necessary during the design process. In this paper the elastic constants of a CLT plate are derived by fitting the real component of the experimental flexural wave velocity with Mindlin's dispersion relation for thick plates, neglecting the influence of the plate's size and boundary conditions. Furthermore, its apparent elastic and stiffness properties are derived from the same set of experimental data, for the plate considered to be thin. Under this latter assumption the orthotropic behaviour of an equivalent thin CLT plate is described by using an elliptic model and verified with experimental results.