There is growing interest from the Canadian wood products industry to produce and use cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels in construction. Because this is a new product in North America, there is a need to demonstrate that the product meets various performance attributes such as structural resistance, sound transmission and fire resistance.
This research aims to address two primary objectives which will support the North American adoption of CLT. First, a generic calculation method for determining the fire-resistance of CLT assemblies is needed to enable producers to manufacture a number of different configurations of panels without the need to run a large number of full-scale fire tests. Second, the CLT assemblies chosen for testing have been identified as the most likely configurations to be used thereby providing test data to support the claims of fire-resistance to help satisfy the authority having jurisdiction.