Research: On the cutting edge of composite product development
Transcript
Stephen Shaler:
Norway spruce was planted back in the ’30s in the CCC days. It’s not native to the U.S. It’s native to Norway, but it was planted as a species. It’s been used for pulp over the years, but now we have a lot of trees that have a lot more value for use in lumber for building houses for example.
But it’s never been evaluated to see how strong it is because we want to make sure that, when you build things, they don’t fall down. You need to make sure that those numbers are right.
Jeff Easterling:
You must have a strength value in order for a sawmill to use the product to saw into construction grade lumber. In other words, you can’t grade it until it has a design value for it.
Stephen Shaler:
We’re doing destructive testing of big pieces of wood. We’re testing them in flexure, bending them. We’re pulling them apart in tension. We’ll be doing some small testing of squeezing them in what we call compression. Also another test that’s called shearing it apart or sliding it apart.
Once it goes through the process and if it gets approved, the infrastructure’s right there. The mills know where this wood is. They could start using it within six months.
Cross-laminated timber or sometimes it’s now called mass timber is a newer construction technique where you combine a lot of wood and make the walls, floors and roofs from these single, in essence, pieces or glued up pieces of wood.
Nicholas Willey:
It’s a better renewable source than concrete or steel because you can recycle concrete or steel, but both of those need to be manufactured at a higher level than CLT. CLT, you harvest the wood and you can put it right together.
It’s very easy construction. It’s just as easy to put it together on site. It really reduces labor costs, speeds up construction, but it’s also insulating. It has high thermal properties. There’s a lot of benefits.
Jaya Tripathi:
I’m testing for hydrothermal properties, which means heat and moisture transfer. We have a couple of sensors embedded inside this panel and they will sense changing temperature and humidity along with the transfer. We use that data to analyze what’s going on.
Stephen Shaler:
What they’re looking at is to use this in mid- to high-rise buildings, four, six, eight — They’ve built buildings up to 10, 12 stories, but they’ve never built anything from spruce-pine-fir which is Norway spruce would be part of that. Really, potentially, this Norway spruce could be used in a CLT product.
Forests are really important to everybody on this world. It’s one of the most important ecosystems. It’s important to animals. It’s important to water. It’s also important for the products that it gives because we’ve got, what, eight, nine billion people now. People need places to live. They need materials.
If you’ve got a sustainably managed forest, there’s nothing more environmentally responsible than using that forest to make things for people, for society. That’s not all a forest is for, but that’s the certainly one of the things it’s for. I view being involved with wood science, being involved with forest products research is very environmentally responsible and needed.