Structural Characteristics of Finger-Jointed Casuarina Glauca Wood

The world is facing some of the biggest environmental challenges of all time. However, one of the potentially efficient approaches is the use of Casuarina Glauca wood. This material is locally produced and more importantly eco-friendly and hence a perfect suggestion for use in green practices. In addition, four different types of adhesives are tested in order to identify which will work well and function more effectively with the wood. The objective of this work is to be able to maximize material use, reduce waste, local sourcing, and enhance dimensional stability which helps in resisting wood warps, improve cost efficiency, and lastly, obtain the most efficient type of adhesive in order to design and assess finger joint configurations for Casuarina Glauca beams, aiming to have longer beams while having sufficient load-bearing capacity for multi-story structures for creating sustainable structural system. To meet this objective, an experimental, as well as, analytical program has been designed to meet this objective, this includes wood tests like obtaining the properties of the wood and the bending strength, also, a three-point bending test was done for the adhesives to acquire the average percentage capacity. Work was done using finite element analysis that enabled several models to be tested in the software without the need for the actual physical testing. Results reveal that the epoxy resin found to have higher bonding strength than other adhesives and that Casuarina Glauca finger-joint wood using epoxy reached about 58% of the bending strength of the solid beam.