Proceedings of the Joint Conference of COST Actions FP1402 & FP1404 Cross Laminated Timber : A competitive wood product for visionary and fire safe buildings

Cross Laminated Timber uses the anisotropy of wood to its advantage by placing laminations across the grain. This elegant solution has led to Cross Laminated Timber (CLT or XLAM) being among the most significant recent innovations in timber engineering. It has grown to an economically significant area of R&D in wood sciences and has the ability to replace many traditional building products with a sustainable solution capable to answer the requests of our contemporary society, e.g. regional production, innovative and flexible designing possibilities, sustainability as well as safe design with respect to the building process and the final product. Invented in Mid Europe some decades ago, the most influential research and development of this product has also been based in Europe for a long time. This is challenged today, as other continents – having started work in this field later but as one joint effort – tend to overtake the European success story. The reasons for this are the known challenges within a unified Europe, very long standardization processes necessitating individual national approaches as well as competition within the timber construction sector rather than joint approaching of new markets. This conference has compiled knowledge about the material and its use, focusing on the design of CLT structures in ambient and fire situations. To this aim, two COST Actions – FP1402 Basis of structural timber design – from research to standards, and FP1404 Fire Safe Use of Bio-Based Building Products – joined efforts to provide contributions and presentations from world leading experts and to bring together expert communities to realize a scientific discourse on these important and interdisciplinary topics, leading to further joint harmonisation progression in research and development. This Joint Conference was meant to contribute to a high-quality and open scientific and technical dialogue within the timber community. The programme therefore included time for debate after the presentations as well as the formation of Think Tanks in which all participants, guided by essential questions, discussed the future challenges and development of CLT. During the Joint Conference, over 200 participants from the worldwide CLT community (ca. 50% coming from industry) showed their will to initiate joint work, concentrating strengths with respect to simplification, harmonisation and, most of all, understanding different points of views. This book contains not only the State-of-the-Art in research and practice, it also documents the valuable thoughts of experts on challenges and necessary developments of CLT within the next years.QC 20160826COST Action FP1402 Basis of structural timber design - from research to standardsCOST Action FP1404 Fire safe use of bio-based building product