CLT Toolbox is now live with Australia’s leading mass timber suppliers all signing partnership agreements with the software provider.
The Wood Central Publisher spoke to CLT Toolbox co-founders Adam Jones and Ringo Thomas, who are both with the software development team in Ethiopia.
They revealed that NeXTimber by Timberlink, Xlam, Cusp and ASH have joined the ARC Advance Timber – administered by the University of Queensland and Monash University in committing to the platform.
The milestone caps off a busy month for the co-founders, who earlier this month announced that Bluescope were among a consortium of investors backing the software to remove ‘bottlenecks’ in mass timber construction systems.
Australia, they said, “has cemented itself as a global leader in timber adoption,” not only in constructing mass timber buildings but also in establishing government policies to champion embodied carbon.
In June, Wood Central revealed that global demand for cross-laminated timber is forecast to triple between 2023 and 2030, driven by demand in the Asia Pacific region fuelled by Australia, Japan, China, and India.
In Australia and NZ alone, the market is expected to exceed 800,000 cubic metres by 2026.
According to co-founder Adam Jones, the software aims to eliminate embodied carbon from construction.
“Cross Laminated Timber is just the beginning; our technology can be applied to all timber products,” he told Wood Central in March.
He said the company aims to empower structural engineers to drive positive change through sustainable design practices.
“By providing state-of-the-art software that automates complex structural design computations and addresses the knowledge gap left by conventional university courses, we can remove barriers to entry for engineers working with sustainable materials.”
The software will, therefore, assist in making up for a shortage of structural engineers available to sign off mass timber construction systems.
“In Australia, we have about 10,000 structural engineers and only 30 of them are timber specialists,” Mr Jones said earlier this month.
