Numerical simulation of the fire behaviour of timber dovetail connections

Numerical results show a good agreement with the experimental ones, so ANSYS and the described methodology prove to be good tools to simulate the performance of timber dovetail connections under a fire event. Traditional failure criteria, which are useful at room temperature, such as Tsai-Wu one, are used in the simulation in order to predict the failure time, but it was demonstrated that this failure criterion is useless at high temperatures, as the ones reached under a 30-min fire event.