The rapid growth of the urban population and associated environmental concerns are challenging city planners and developers to consider sustainable and cost-efficient building systems. Timber-based buildings, such as sustainable systems, are increasingly used. The timber buildings, however, being lighter and flexible, can be vulnerable to earthquakes and wind loads. This paper gives a state-of-the-art review on performance-based design (PBD) considerations and future direction for timber and timber-based hybrid buildings. The PBD review covered both earthquake and wind loads and multi-hazard design considerations. The review also provided 1) current practice and future direction in consideration of hazard, response, and loss assessment within the multi-hazard PBD, 2) damping and energy dissipation devices, 3) optimization under uncertainty, and 4) future of surrogate and multi-fidelity modeling in PBD.
As the height of mass timber buildings continues to grow, a new set of design and detailing challenges arises, creating the need for new engineering solutions to achieve optimal building construction and performance. One necessary detailing consideration is vertical movement, which includes column shrinkage, joint settlement, and creep. The main concerns are the impact of deformations on vertical mechanical systems, exterior enclosures, and interior partitions, as well as differential vertical movement of timber framing systems relative to other building features such as concrete core walls and exterior façades.
From record-breaking timber towers to innovative examples of adaptive reuse, mass timber construction is on the rise. Stay current with Think Wood and WoodWorks’ newly updated, must-have Volume 2 of the popular Mass Timber Design Manual.
Volume 2 features updated free and interactive resources to guide architects, developers, engineers, and anyone working on a mass timber project.
This manual is helpful for experts and novices alike. Whether you’re new to mass timber or an early adopter you’ll benefit from its comprehensive summary of the most up to date resources on topics from mass timber products and applications to tall wood construction and sustainability.
The manual’s content includes WoodWorks technical papers, Think Wood continuing education articles, case studies, expert Q&As, technical guides and other helpful tools. Click through to view each individual resource or download the master resource folder for all files in one handy location. For your convenience, this book will be updated regularly as mass timber product development and the market are quickly evolving.
While taller mass timber buildings continue to capture worldwide attention, the University of Idaho chose to pursue a different type of innovation with the Idaho Central Credit Union Arena by showcasing wood’s impressive long-span capabilities. Inspired by the rolling hills of the nearby Palouse, the undulating wood roof of this sports and events facility soars over the open space below, creating a visually stunning structure not typically associated with large arenas.
This project is also unique in that it was built through a collaboration of Idaho stakeholders, using wood harvested from the University of Idaho’s Experimental Forest, made into glue-laminated timber (glulam) beams by Idaho manufacturers. “The complex structure makes a strong statement, not only for what mass timber can do, but also for what Idaho’s timber industry can do,” said Lucas Epp, Vice President and Head of Engineering for StructureCraft.
Throughout the last two decades the timber building sector has experienced a steady growth in multi-storey construction. Although there has been a growing number of research focused on trends, benefits, and disadvantages in timber construction from various technical perspectives, so far there is no extensive literature on the trajectory of emerging architectural typologies. This paper presents an examination of architectural variety and spatial possibilities in current serial and modular multi-storey timber construction. It aims to draw a parallel between architectural characteristics and their relation to structural systems in timber. The research draws from a collection of 350 contemporary multi-storey timber building projects between 2000 and 2021. It consists of 300 built projects, 12 projects currently in construction, and 38 design proposals. The survey consists of quantitative and qualitative project data, as well as classification of the structural system, material, program, massing, and spatial organization of the projects. It then compares the different structural and design aspects to achieve a comprehensive overview of possibilities in timber construction. The outcome is an identification of the range of morphologies and a better understanding of the design space in current serial and modular multi-storey mass timber construction.
The construction industry represents one of the greatest contributors to atmospheric emissions of CO2 and anthropogenic climate change, largely resulting from the production of commonly used building materials such as steel and concrete. It is well understood that the extraction and manufacture of these products generates significant volumes of greenhouse gases and, therefore, this industry represents an important target for reducing emissions. One possibility is to replace emissions-intensive, non-renewable materials with more environmentally friendly alternatives that minimise resource depletion and lower emissions. Although timber has not been widely used in mid- to high-rise buildings since the industrial revolution, recent advances in manufacturing have reintroduced wood as a viable product for larger and more complex structures. One of the main advantages of the resurgence of wood is its environmental performance; however, there is still uncertainty about how mass timber works and its suitability relative to key performance criteria for construction material selection. Consequently, the aim of this study is to help guide decision making in the construction sector by providing a comprehensive review of the research on mass timber. Key performance criteria for mass timber are reviewed, using existing literature, and compared with those for typical concrete construction. The review concludes that mass timber is superior to concrete and steel when taking into consideration all performance factors, and posits that the construction industry should, where appropriate, transition to mass timber as the low-carbon, high performance building material of the future.
Since the publication of the first edition of this guide, substantial regulatory changes have been implemented in the 2020 edition of the National Building Code of Canada: the addition of encapsulated mass timber construction up to 12 storeys, and the early adoption of the related provisions by several provinces are the most notable ones. The 2022 edition of this guide brings together, under one cover, the experience gained from recently built tall wood projects, highlights from the most recent building codes and standards, and research findings to help achieve the best environmental, structural, fire, and durability performance of mass timber products and systems, including their health benefits. The approaches to maximizing the benefits of prefabrication and building information modelling, which collectively result in fast, clean, and quiet project delivery, are discussed. Methods for addressing limitations controlled by fire requirements (through an Alternative Solution) or seismic requirements (through a hybrid solution using an Acceptable Solution in steel or concrete) are included. How best to build with mass timber to meet the higher performance requirements of the Energy Step Codes is also discussed. What makes building in wood a positive contribution toward tackling climate change is discussed so that design teams, in collaboration with building owners, can take the steps necessary to meet either regulatory or market requirements.
The recycling potential (RP) indicates the ability of building materials to form a closed-loop material flow, that is, the material efficiency during its whole life cycle. Mass timber constructions and concrete buildings vary widely in RP, but the differences are difficult to calculate. This paper proposed a level-based scheme to compare the RP of mass timber and concrete buildings, and a BIM-Eco2soft-MS Excel workflow coupling Material Cycle Database and digital design tools were established to obtain information on building materials, resource consumption, and environmental impact for the RP calculation. Taking a residential building as an example, the difference in RP between mass timber and concrete at the material-level is firstly discussed. Then at the component-level, the RP of the wood structure component and concrete component is compared, and the optimization methods are proposed. Finally, the difference in RP between the mass timber building and reinforced concrete building at the building-level are illustrated. The results show that the RP of mass timber building is higher, and the disassembly ability is better. Within a 100-year service life, the RP of mass timber buildings is 73% and that of the reinforced concrete building is 34%. The total amount of material consumption and waste of the Variant CLT is 837,030 kg and 267,237 kg respectively, which is less than one-third of that of concrete buildings (3,458,488 kg; 958,145 kg). The Global Warming potential (GWP) of these two variants is -174.0 kgCO2/m2 and 221.0 kgCO2/m2 separately, indicating that the Variant CLT can realize negative carbon emissions and gain ecological benefits. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to explore the potential impacts of certain parameters on GWP and RP of buildings. The research can provide the reference for material selection, component design, and RP optimization of mass timber buildings. In addition, new ideas for assessing the potential of circularity as a design tool are proposed to support the transition towards a circular construction industry and to realize carbon neutrality.
A framework for the probabilistic finite element model updating based on measured modal data is presented. The described framework is applied to a seven-storey building made of cross-laminated timber panels. The experimental estimates based on the forced vibration test are used in the process of model updating. First, a generalized Polynomial Chaos surrogate model is derived representing the map from the model parameters to the eigenfrequencies and the eigenvectors. To overcome the difficulties caused by mode switching, we propose a novel approach to mode tracking based on partitioning an extended and low-rank representation of the mode shapes resulting from different setups of the finite element model into clusters by the k-means clustering algorithm. Second, the surrogate model derived with the help of mode pairing is used to efficiently perform sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification of the first five frequencies and the corresponding mode shapes. Finally, the surrogate-based Bayesian update of the model parameters is efficiently performed, providing engineers not only with a finite element model that gives a good fit to the experimental modal data, but also a stochastic model that represents the uncertainties originating from the initial model and the uncertainties of measuring modal properties.
The effects of long duration ground motions on the seismic performance of a newly constructed two-storey balloon-type cross-laminated timber (CLT) building located in Vancouver, Canada, was studied. A three-dimensional numerical model of the building was developed in OpenSees. The connection and shear wall models were validated with test data. Twenty-four pairs of long and short duration records with approximately the same amplitude, frequency content, and rate of energy build-up were used for nonlinear dynamic analyses. Fragility curves were developed based on the results of incremental dynamic analysis to assess the building’s collapse capacity. At design intensity level, ground motion duration was shown not to be a critical factor as the difference in inter-storey drift ratio between the two sets of records was negligible. However, due to the larger number of inelastic cycles, the long duration motions increased the median probability of collapse by 9% when compared with the short duration motions. Further research is required to evaluate the duration effects on taller and platform-type CLT buildings.
