Stock discretized structural timber elements
A structural evaluation of a computational optimized timber load-bearing system discretized by an available stockpile
Student:
Mentors:
Daan Weerdesteijn
Stijn Brancart
Hans Hoogenboom
The current lifecycle of timber is far from circular and in the Netherlands currently almost all the collected waste wood is either incinerated to produce energy or down-cycled into engineered board products. In The Netherlands around 1.740kton of waste wood is collected annually, 26% of this wood consists of solid non-glued wood, translating to potential a waste stream of 450kton that could be directly reused. Using programming and optimisation techniques, this thesis focused on creating an efficient and adaptable structural system able to directly use the parts form a varying stock of reclaimed timber pieces. A computational tool was developed with the goal to minimize the cutting-losses and material consumption, tackling both a matching and structural optimisation problem. Used techniques involve dynamic programming, principal stress line analysis and a ground structure optimisation approach, which combined, ensure an efficient discrete aggregation. A novel structural system, designed for the outputted aggregation, maximizes the future reuse potential of the used parts, closing the current wasted lifecycle of discarded timber.