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’.
Many strategies have been investigated seeking for efficiency in construction sector, since it has been pointed out as the largest consumer of raw materials worldwide and responsible of about 1/3 of the global CO2 emissions. While operational carbon has been strongly reduced due to building regulations, embodied carbon is becoming dominating. Resources and processes involved from material extraction to building erection should be carefully optimized aiming to reduce the emissions from the cradle to service. New advancements in timber engineering have shown the capabilities of this renewable and CO2 neutral material in multi-storey buildings. Since their erection is based on prefabrication, an accurate construction management is eased where variations and waste are sensible to be minimized. Through this paper, the factors constraining the use of wood as main material for multi-storey buildings will be explored and the potential benefits of using Lean Construction principles in the timber industry are highlighted aiming to achieve a standardized workflow from design to execution. Hence, a holistic approach towards industrialization is proposed from an integrated BIM model, through an optimized supply chain of off-site production, and to a precise aligned scheduled on-site assembly.
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...
International Conference on New Horizons in Green Civil Engineering
Research Status
Complete
Summary
Wood structures such as the Wood Innovation and Design Center in Prince George and the UBC Tallwood House, an 18 storey, 53-meter-tall mass timber hybrid building are examples of new and innovative wood structures that encompass new construction techniques, unique materials and novel building practices. Empirical data on the condition of critical components and access to the real-time status of the structure during construction gives Architects, Engineers and Contractors critical information to make informed decisions to either validate or improve the construction plan. Data recorded during the life of the building helps validate the design decisions and proves the viability and feasibility of the design. Methods and practices used to monitor both the moisture performance of prefabricated cross laminate timber (CLT) as well as the vertical movement sensing of the building during and after construction are explored in this paper. Moisture content of the CLT panels has been recorded from manufacturing and prefabrication to storage, through transport and during installation and will continue throughout the service life of the building.
The calculated and expected displacement of the wood columns is scheduled to take several years as the structure settles, however a first-year analysis and extrapolation of the data was conducted. Monitoring during transport, storage, and construction proved that CLT panels were resilient to moisture issues while in the manufacturers storage, but prone to direct exposure to moisture-related problems regardless of the precautions taken on site. Despite construction during typical Pacific Northwest rain, informed decisions were made to ensure the panel moisture content could decrease to acceptable ranges before continuing to secondary construction phases. The moisture trends observed in the building were proportional to the control samples as both were subjected to similar environmental conditions.
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...
