Cross laminated timber (CLT) is an innovative and environment friendly engineered timber product with superior structural performance. CLT offers strong resistance against both in-plane and out-of-plane loading. Hence, it is widely used as floors, roofs or wall elements. Considerable experimental research on CLT under various loading conditions has been done in the recent past. This article presents a comprehensive review of various design methods to determine basic mechanical properties such as tension, compression and rolling shear strength of CLT with primary focus on Norway spruce. All relevant experimental data available from existing literature were collated and consequently been used to evaluate the performance of various methods to design CLT structures. The comparison revealed that different methods show considerable variance in predicting the capacity of CLT panels due to the variation in timber species, which affects the corresponding mechanical properties of the lamella. In addition to species, rolling shear properties can also vary considerably depending on the type of experimental technique used for testing. A predictive model has also been proposed to correlate rolling shear strength obtained from shear analogy method to that obtained using planar shear.

Cross-laminated timber; mass timber; mechanical strength; rolling shear strength; planar shear test; short span bending test