| Project Detail |
Innovating timber slabs to build a sustainable future
The widespread use of reinforced concrete slabs in multi-storey buildings poses significant environmental challenges. The production and installation of these slabs are resource-intensive, contributing to high carbon emissions and energy consumption. Moreover, their structural inflexibility often limits architectural creativity and design adaptability. With this in mind, the EIC-funded UniversalTimberSlab project aims to develop innovative design, engineering, and fabrication methods for timber slabs, offering a sustainable and versatile alternative to traditional concrete structures in urban construction projects. This initiative promises universally applicable, cost-effective solutions with high structural performance. Computational tools and AI-driven decision support systems will streamline design complexities, enabling adaptability to diverse building needs.
The project aims to develop novel design, engineering and fabrication methods for point-supported timber slab structures in multi-storey buildings. It aims to provide the fundamental technologies for a sustainable alternative building system that could broadly replace point-supported reinforced concrete slabs - especialy in urban building projects. The project aims to develop a universally applicable, suppliable, usable and affordable alternative building system and make timber construction broadly available. It is based on a building system concept, in which complex arrangement of wood lamellas provide the potential for high structural performance. Questions of design computation, structural engineering, simulation methods and mechanical testing of this system will be addressed in the project. Provided the complexity of the material makeup and potentially long computing times, surrogate modelling methods will be developed based on disciplinary modelling methods. These allow fast computation of various design options. An AI-based Intelligent Decision Support System will integrate all surrogate models and provide informative design feedback of the universal timber slab system throughout all design stages. The building system will be applicable to multidirectional, long-span slabs and enable computationally derived geometric adaptivity to typical building project boundary conditions - such as site, program and design intent. The possibility for free and sparse column layouts allows for higher design flexibility and the design of mixed-use urban platforms with a great potential for long-term reusability. The system leverages computational design and construction to build bespoke, highly material efficient and digitally scaleable building structures from wood. Hence it provides high potential to sustainably and broadly disrupt predominant, energy- and carbon intensive reinforced concrete slabs in building construction. |
