Construction of All-Wood Trusses with Plywood Nodes and Wooden Pegs: A Strategy towards Resource-Efficient Timber Construction

Abstract

Timber truss systems are very efficient load-bearing structures. They allow for great freedom in design and are characterised by high material use in combination with a low environmental impact. Unfortunately, the extensive effort in design and production have made the manufacturing and application of these structures, in this day and age, a rarity. In addition, the currently mainly used steel gusset plates adversely affect the costs and environmental impact of the trusses. The authors’ goals are to optimise the design of timber trusses and to solely use wood for all building components. The two research areas, (1) optimisation of the truss geometry and (2) optimisation of the joints by using solely wood–wood connections, are addressed in this paper. The numerical optimisation strategy is based on a parametric design of the truss and the use of a genetic solver for the optimisation regarding minimal material consumption. Furthermore, first results of the tensile and compression behaviour of the chosen wood–wood connections are presented. The basic idea for the joints is to use a plywood plate as a connector, which is inserted into the truss members and fixed with wooden pegs. The housing of the new robot laboratory located at BOKU Vienna is considered a special case study for the research and serves as an accompanying example for the application of the research within the present paper.

Otimização de estruturas de madeira: revisão sistemática da literatura e análise de metodologias

“…A representação da treliça otimizada para a consideração de massa como função objetivo é apresentada na Figura 6. Os resultados obtidos por Kromoser et al (2021) são apresentados na Tabela 3. Diferentes configurações de treliças são geradas dependendo do valor da função objetivo definido e dos parâmetros liberados para otimização.…”

Comparative Analysis of the Mechanical Performance of Timber Flat Truss Typologies for Different Strength Classes via Optimization Algorithm

“…The optimization process of the present work aims to minimize the total weight of the truss structural system, a decision based on the study by Kromoser et al [50], considering nodal displacement constraints, mechanical strength of the bars, minimum dimensions, minimum areas, and geometric criteria due to structural instability. The objective function (OF) is the total weight of the structure, presented in Equation (1), where A i and L 0 i are the cross-sectional area and the length of bar i, ρ i is the material density of bar i, and n is the number of bars present in the truss.…”

Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) [Volume 2]

“…a board plywood deck or a board stack wall (Herzog et al, 2003). Yet in a large and upscaling market the material demand of solid timber buildings will quickly exceed the supply of sustainably sourced timber (Kromoser et al, 2021) Limited research has been conducted on the spatial robotic assembly of wood joints. Apolinarska et al (2020) utilised reinforcement learning models to control the robotic assembly of tight fit timber joints.…”