New Strength And Safety Tests Pit Timber Against Concrete And Steel

by | Dec 5, 2018 | News

Thanks to innovative construction materials like cross-laminated timber (CLT) and laminated veneer lumber (LVL), wooden buildings are no longer mere houses made of sticks.

Attracted by the aesthetic and environmental benefits of timber, structural engineers have overseen a lumber comeback, from Landlease’s International House development in Sydney’s Barangaroo district to Brisbane’s newly completed 25 King, which is the world’s tallest commercial timber building.

But with ambitious projects in Tokyo, Chicago, and London eyeing far greater heights for timber as a building material, engineers and the public need to be assured wood can match up with concrete and steel when it comes to safety and stability.

That’s why Griffith University’s Associate Professor Benoit Gilbert has been putting timber to the test, using high-tech machinery to better understand how timber behaves in a variety of situations.

Gilbert’s current tests focus on progressive collapse, a term that describes the severe failure of a structure due to something going wrong in one part of it. That could be a gas explosion, a fire or if a car were to collide with the building.

Read more on this from Create at https://www.createdigital.org.au/strength-safety-tests-timber/.

Cross-Laminated Timber As A Forest Management Strategy

by | Aug 6, 2018 | News

The state legislature earlier this year called on the Washington State Building Code Council (WSBCC) to adopt rules for cross-laminated timber (CLT) use when building residential and commercial buildings. The move represents ongoing efforts to bring CLT into mainstream use for residential and commercial construction, which would create commercial value for the small-diameter trees that are contributing to poor forestland health in Washington state.

For state and federal officials, as well as private stakeholders, that change could hasten restoration work by making tree thinning a profitable endeavor rather than a costly project requiring government funding.

The potential CLT offers was articulated by U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Chief Vicki Christiansen at the 2018 Pacific NorthWest Economic Region Summit in Spokane on July 24. “We can use new opportunities for forest product delivery to help us to improve forest conditions, while also creating jobs and sustaining rural communities. We can implement these new practices by working together and being a good neighbor.”

Forest Service Region 6 covers Washington and Oregon and includes 28 percent of all forestland across Washington. In recent years the federal agency has struggled to conduct forest health work due to “fire borrowing” in which those portions of its budget are used to pay for the high cost of firefighting. During last year’s wildfire season USFS spent $2 billion on wildfire fighting, more than half its budget. There were 50 large fires on USFS land and over 411,000 acres burned, costing the agency $130 million. Over 90 percent of those fires were human-caused. In April, federal legislation sought to end the practice of fire-borrowing by allocating additional long-term funding to USFS to the tune of $2 billion starting in 2020.

A 2014 analysis by The Nature Conservancy and USFS concluded that half a million acres of forestland managed by the federal agency in Eastern Washington were in need of thinning and prescribed burns. Along with the new funding, Christiansen said that they can also “align our best practice policies and guidance with the changing markets that are certainly emerging in the Pacific Northwest.”

Read more on this from The Lens at https://thelens.news/2018/07/31/cross-laminated-timber-as-forest-management-strategy/.

Pacific Northwest: Study Touts Jobs Growth Tied To Cross-Laminated Timber

by | Sep 22, 2017 | News

The production of cross-laminated timber, or CLT, has the potential to create significant job growth in the Pacific Northwest, according to a study published in July 2017 by Oregon BEST, a Portland-based nonprofit.

CLT is made of layers of glued 2-inch-thick dimensional wood crossing over each other at a 90-degree angle, creating a strong panel that can be used in tall buildings.

The 110-page study, “Advanced Wood Product Manufacturing Study for Cross-Laminated Timber Acceleration in Oregon and SW Washington,” was funded by $120,000 from the U.S. Economic Development Administration. The study included wood products companies from across the region, including D.R. Johnson in Riddle, the first structurally certified CLT producer in the U.S.

Valerie Johnson, president of D.R. Johnson, said she agrees with the study that cross-laminated timber will increase employment for rural areas in Oregon like Douglas County. D.R. Johnson started its first glue-laminated timber, or glulam, plant in 1967 in Riddle, and began producing cross-laminated timber in fall 2015.

“The community is part of the fabric of this company. It’s not only where our employees live it’s where our families have grown up and continue to live, and making this a successful venture is really important to us,” Johnson said. “We’re giving it all we can because we really want it to be successful.”

From Treesource: https://treesource.org/news/goods-and-services/cross-laminated-timber-jobs/

Washington CLT: ‘The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Wood’

by | Apr 12, 2017 | News

Washington CLT: ‘The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Wood’

 

Cross laminated timber, or CLT, is being touted as a revolutionary and environmentally friendly building material that can support structures reaching 12 stories and potentially higher, and could a game-changing economic factor that timber communities have been looking for since the industry began to decline three decades ago.

“It’s the greatest thing since sliced wood; that’s my tag line,” said former state senator Brian Hatfield, Gov. Jay Inslee’s personal pick as his go-to guy for studying ways to breathe life back into the state’s wood products industry.

CLT’s potential economic impact on a timber area like the Twin Harbors is not lost on Hatfield, or 6th District Congressman Derek Kilmer, a Democrat from Gig Harbor.

“God knows we’ve got proximity to the natural resource base,” said Kilmer. “This has the potential to be a real win-win for the area; certainly a win for the economy. The timber industry has been around a long time. We’ve taken some shots to the chin over the last few decades, but I think this provides an opportunity to have the Olympic Peninsula take the initiative and show the world that timber towns can be relevant, and innovative, in the 21st Century.”

What is CLT, and what makes it such a promising alternative to more traditional wood and steel – and even heavy timber – construction? The CLT Handbook, produced by Canada-based FP Innovations in 2013, describes cross laminated timber as “several layers of lumber boards stacked crosswise (typically at 90 degrees) and glued together on their wide faces and, sometimes, on the narrow faces as well.”

From The Daily World: thedailyworld.com.

 

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