Mechanical Behavior And ANSYS Analysis Of Dougong In Chinese Ancient Timber Building

Chinese traditional architecture holds a very important position in the world with its timber structure, long history, large quantity, complex structure, rich scientific and cultural content, and excellent seismic behaviors. A kind of extremely unique construction appears during the developing process of timber structure system which is named Dougong. It synthesizes the merits of tenon and mortise.The conformation and function of Dougong were concluded and summarized in this paper, and the mechanical performances, failure patterns and seismic characteristics were analyzed also. Combined with previous results of test, the nonlinear behavior of connection stiffness was studied. In addition, the ductile coefficients and viscous damping ratio were obtained.The axial loading experiment and the low-cyclic reversed loading experiment of Dougong were numerically simulated by ANSYS program. The force-deformation curves and the hysteretic curves of Dougong were obtained, failure patterns of Dougong were also taken into account. The analytical result was compared with that of experiment. It is shown that the simulation of timber structures by ANSYS program is available in practice.