Emily Diedrich, ARCS Scholar 2019-2020, is working on completing her PhD in Civil Engineering.  Her focus is on mass timber beam-column joints and mass timber frames.  The first phase of the project will focus on the joint which uses steel plates and dowels to connect an LVL beam and column.  Her group will be applying monotonic and cyclic loads to the joint and observe the response.  The second phase of tests will focus on the mass timber frame and will use the results of the joint test to guide the design for beam-column connections in the frame.   Both in-plane and out-of-plane cyclic loads will be applied to the frame and the response of the system will be observed. The group will be developing numerical models to represent the tests.  Mass timber is interesting because it is a sustainable material with many construction benefits, but there are only a few mass timber systems to resist earthquakes defined in the building codes. This project aims to fill the gap by studying a mass timber buckling restrained brace frame.  Emily is shown below in the lab running a test.