This project identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the increased use of prefabricated timber building (PTB) systems in Class 2 to 9 commercial buildings, such as apartments, hotels, office buildings and schools.
PTB systems in Australia are in a formative stage and yet to achieve broad acceptance in the marketplace as a conventional method of building.
Opportunities for PTB systems can use timber’s well-established benefits such as high strength-to-weight ratio; design and construction flexibility; general environmental credentials including carbon sequestration; and prefabrication’s suitability for use on brown-field, restricted access and difficult sites and developments. In addition legislative constraints have now been largely removed (e.g. through changes to the 2016 National Construction Code).
An increase in large scale mid-rise prefabricated buildings, and with the increasing nationalisation and internationalisation of the top tier building companies, suggests market acceptance will grow as PTB buildings are seen as ‘normal’.
In Phase I (2018-19) of this project on Prefabricated Heavy Timber Modular Construction, three major types of connections used in a stackable modular building were studied: intramodule connection, inter-module vertical connection, and inter-module horizontal connection. The load requirement and major design criteria were identified...
Prefabrication of timber envelope components is a constantly developing research field, which attracts interest from various sectors of expertise thanks to the conspicuous advantages it can confer in terms of resources savings, as well as quality management and safety for all actors involved in the process...
The considerable increase in the architectural demands for highly transparent and load-bearing structures have recently resulted in the development of an innovative hybrid structure. This article provides a review of design parameters for Timber-Glass composite facades. The design/architectural question, which arose in the project, was how...
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...
The thermal refurbishment of the building stock is one of the most fundamental challenges of sustainable urban development. Particularly the use of natural and local materials gets an increasing relevance, regarding the embodied energy. The focus of this work is the development of systematised solutions for thermal refurbishment with...
