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For structural engineers, the two most important design criteria are utility andsafety. It is about making sure that a structural component is reliable enough not toendanger any of a building's users, while at the same time being as sustainable andefficiently designed as possible. In other words, an element must be safe enough towithstand the improbability and sufficiently cheap to be relevant for the design.Considering this, using a material such as wood instead of metal may prove to be asustainable alternative for certain building components.Timber can be designed to sustain high temperatures and fire; it has a high strengthrelative to its weight and is naturally produced. Furthermore, an engineered woodproduct such as birch plywood has proven very strong in structural applications,especially when glued. Therefore, birch plywood has great potential as a reliablematerial in structural components. In this work, a total of 24 specimens with birchplywood connections were tested experimentally.The specimens were designed to enforce stress states that would occur in actualtrusses. Additionally, Specimens were assembled with two different connectionmethods, one being a dowel-type connection and the other being a glued-type. Eachtype of connection was tested in both tension and compression, with a total of threerepetitions each. For the glued-type specimens, birch plywood plates wereinvestigated in three different angles to the face grain; 0°, 5° and 15°. Theload-displacement relationships and the failure modes are of specific interest in thisthesis.Test results showed that failure modes were semi-brittle and distinct, and the testsshowed that glued-type connections withstood 37% higher loads than dowelledtypes. Specimens might withstand even higher loads if gluing were performed in amore controlled environment. The load-to-face-grain angle of plywood also had asignificant impact on the capacity of connections. For the 0°-specimens with gluedconnections tested in compression, no failures occurred in the plywood, and testsreached loads as high as 82 kN. Calculations were made estimating the load capacityas high as 95 kN, but possibly a more realistic approximation would be 85 kN. Thiswould imply that the 0°-specimens are around 20% stronger than the 15°-specimensand approximately 17,7% stronger than the 5°-specimens tested in compression.Birch plywood is promising to be used in connections of timber structures whereplates transfer forces between structural elements.

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The I-35W Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, MN had a catastrophic failure in the main span of the deck truss in 2007. This collapse has brought significant attention on the gusset plate connections in steel truss bridges throughout the U.S. Steel truss bridge gusset plate design has not received much focus in the past 40 years, and there is a lack of consensus within the design profession on the procedures to evaluate, design, and rate these critical elements. In the short term, based on the best available information on the gusset plate design, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has issued preliminary guidance. Although some experimental research has been conducted on the ultimate strength of gusset plates, much of this work has been directed toward the performance of tension members and their connections. There has been limited experimental work on the compression capacity and stability of gusset plates, but most of this work is relevant primarily to bracing connections common in building structures. This research focuses on comprehensive experimental and analytical studies on steel truss bridge gusset plate behavior. The studies include comparisons of advanced analytical models with the responses from large-scale experimental tests using discrete and innovative full-field measurements. The calibrated finite element analysis models are then utilized to study a variety of gusset plate configurations. Improved mechanistic idealizations that better capture the observed behavior in the experiments and analytical studies are proposed as the result of this work. The design checks recommended in this thesis present a comprehensive methodology for determining the ultimate gusset plate resistance. This research provides a large database of original results that will be useful for future similar studies. In addition, this research provides modeling procedures that permit the study of steel truss bridge connections and their adjacent framing members using truss bridge sub-assemblies. Based on the comprehensive analytical studies, simple and accurate design calculation procedures to assess the nominal ultimate strength of steel truss gusset plate connections are recommended for steel truss bridge gusset plate connections.

Master thesis is focused to design the timber pedestrian bridge over the track. The load-bearing construction is composed from the truss girder and cross laminated tiber plates. Bridge is coveder. Layout dimensions of the bridge are 49.0 m x 4.8 m