When Adidas announced plans for a two-building expansion of their North American headquarters, speed and budget were key criteria. They wanted a campus that reflected their culture and commitment to quality, authenticity and innovation, but had a strict 24-month deadline. In response, the design and construction team chose a hybrid of precast concrete and mass timber for one building, and a mass timber post-and-beam solution for the other, using prefabrication to reduce the construction schedule by more than three months.
Advanced industrialized construction methods enable complex building components and systems to be built with high precision and quality. This manufacturing technique has an advantage to provide cost-competitive and high energy efficient building components and systems for both retrofits and new construction. This document gives an overview of the use of prefabricated panels in building Net Zero Energy Ready wood-frame multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) in Edmonton.
A balanced combination of heat flows creates suitable conditions for thermal comfort—a factor contributing to the quality of the internal environment of buildings. The presented analysis of selected thermal-technical parameters is up-to-date and suitable for verifying the parameters of building constructions. The research also applied a methodology for examining the acoustic parameters of structural parts of buildings in laboratory conditions. In this research, selected variant solutions of perimeter walls based on prefab cross laminated timber were investigated in terms of acoustic and thermal-technical properties. The variants structures were investigated in laboratory but also in model conditions. The results of the analyses show significant differences between the theoretical or declared parameters and the values measured in laboratory conditions. The deviations of experimental measurements from the calculated or declared parameters were not as significant for variant B as they were for variant A. These findings show that for these analyzed sandwich structures based on wood, it is not always possible to reliably declare calculated values of thermal-technical and acoustic parameters. It is necessary to thoroughly examine such design variants, which would contribute to the knowledge in this field of research of construction systems based on wood.
The paper describes experimental and numerical analyses on a completely new connection system developed for CLT (Cross Laminated Timber) constructions. The innovative solution herein proposed, named X-RAD, consists of a point-to-point mechanical connection system, fixed to the corners of the CLT panels. This connection, that is designed to be prefabricated, is made of a metal wrapping and an inner hard wood element which are fastened to the panel by means of allthreaded self-tapping screws. Such system permits to reduce significantly the number of bolts/fasteners required to assemble two or more panels together or to connect them to the foundation. This results in the enhancement of the installation process in terms of speed, quality and safety. One of the reasons that fuelled the development of the presented system, is the desire of offering a solution to those issues (e.g. to satisfy ductility and energetic dissipation requirements) commonly related to the seismic safety of timber structures. In other words there was the will of defining a system able to guarantee an adequate level of ductility and energetic dissipation.
Calculative Cost and Process Analysis of Timber-Concrete-Composite Ceilings with Focus on Effort and Performance Values for Cost Calculations of Multi-Storey Timber Buildings
Composite structures use the advantages of two materials – timber and concrete – and improve the efficiency of a material application. Especially the concept of timber-concrete-composite ceilings has synergetic effects to achieve an effective ratio of thickness to span with high cost effectiveness simultaneously. Following the systematic...
This article outlines the structural design approach used for the Brock Commons Student Residence project, an 18-storey wood building at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. When completed in summer 2017, it will be the tallest mass timber hybrid building in the world at 53 meters high. Fast + Epp are the structural engineers, working in conjunction with Acton Ostry Architects and Hermann Kaufmann Architekten. Total project costs, inclusive of fees, permits etc. are $51.5M CAD.
The widely available automated prefabrication in timber construction companies, as well as modern CAD software with application programing interfaces, allow for the design and production of increasingly geometrically complex building components. This development also enables and demands at the same time advanced joinery techniques. Analog to the developments in timber framing, this article presents the adaptation of a traditional wood-wood joinery technique from cabinetmaking, on the casestudy of a shell structure built from curved cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels. The dovetail-joints allow for a load-bearing glued joint between the CLT panels. They provide an aesthetic, visible connection and simplify the assembly through their integrated locator features.
The present work aims to define horizontal joint dimension tolerances for newly proposed prefabricated façade systems for applications in tall cross laminated timber (CLT) buildings based on the compression perpendicular to grain characteristics of the component. This requires a thorough understanding of structural settlement under vertical loads which can vary at each floor height. An experimental program has been carried out with reference to the case of a platform frame building construction, where major perpendicular to grain compression of the floor can occur under high loads. Five-layer CLT specimens have been tested under compression via the application of a line load with steel plate as well as actual CLT wall specimens. Strengthening contribution using full threaded self-tapping wood screws has also been investigated. Results of deformation characteristics have been validated through a non-linear finite element analysis and further elaborated in order to outline implications in the design of a prefabricated façade.
Cross-Laminated Timber is one of the most widely used engineered wood products, thanks to its numerous advantages, among which construction speed is the most appreciated, both by clients and by designers. However, construction scheduling compression refers exclusively to CLT structures, while the rest of the construction process still requires a longer phase to complete vertical enclosures. The aim of the research work presented in this paper is to outline advantages brought about when the degree of envelope prefabrication of tall timber buildings is increased. Results are presented in two sections. The first includes the definition of a case study together with an overview of possible technical details for entirely prefabricated façade solutions, ready to be installed without the need to work via scaffolds. The second deals with construction site management analysis for the case study building, where the determination of specific factors having an influence on time and costs is achieved by varying the prefabrication degree of the various façade configurations and repeating the analysis process. The main findings of this research work demonstrate that comprehensive façade prefabrication allows not only consistent compression of construction scheduling to be achieved, but also for immediate protection of wooden elements from weather agents.
Compared to light-frame wood shear walls, it is relatively difficult for panelized CLT shear walls to achieve similar levels of lateral deflection without paying special attention to design details, i.e., connections. A design lacking ductility or energy dissipating mechanism will result in high acceleration amplifications and excessive global overturning demands for multistory buildings, and even more so for tall wood buildings. Although a number of studies have been conducted on CLT shear walls and building assemblies since the 1990s, the wood design community’s understanding of the seismic behavior of panelized CLT systems is still in the learning phase, hence the impetus for this article and the tall CLT building workshop, which will be introduced herein. For example, there has been a recent trend in engineering to improve resiliency, which seeks to design a building system such that it can be restored to normal functionality sooner after an earthquake than previously possible, i.e., it is a resilient system. While various resilient lateral system concepts have been explored for concrete and steel construction, this concept has not yet been realized for multistory CLT systems. This forum article presents a review of past research developments on CLT as a lateral force-resisting system, the current trend toward design and construction of tall buildings with CLT worldwide, and attempts to summarize the societal needs and challenges in developing resilient CLT construction in regions of high seismicity in the United States.
