Limit States Design in Wood: A Canadian Perspective

One of the major changes in timber engineering practice in Canada in the next decade will be the conversion from the traditional Working Stress Design method to a method common to all materials which relates the design process more clearly to strength and serviceability criteria: Limit States Design (LSD). Essential to this conversion will be the improvement of our knowledge of the dependable structural resistance of wood. This paper reviews the philosophy of LSD and examines important current research and recent construction experiences which affect our knowledge of wood’s structural performance, including duration of load, size effects, methods of determining characteristic strength properties of wood, and service conditions.

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