Overly conservative design could be leading to an excessive use of material in flooring systems, resulting in much more costly mass timber buildings. That is according to Adam Faircloth, a Forest Product Researcher at the Queensland Department of Primary Industries (QPI), who has just published The Global Perception of Vibration & Acoustics—the latest Gottstein Fellowship Report.
With Gottstein Trust funding support, Mr Faircloth, also a PhD candidate at Griffith University, travelled to 13 countries where he visited more than 100 practitioners involved in flooring systems: “Recent innovations in mass timber panels such as cross-laminated timber, glued laminated timber, and other composites present opportunities to compete with conventional building materials like concrete and steel on a low-to-mid-rise scale.”
However, “due to timber’s low density (relative to concrete and steel), it is often sensitive to low-frequency vibrations and acoustic events, those commonly excited by footfall loading (walking vibrations) and impact noise. This sensitivity could lead to excessive deflections, uncomfortable or continuous motions, and excessive noise transfer between floors and rooms.”
Mr Faircloth said the challenge could lie in knowledge gaps in product design, product performance, and regional variation: “It is not a case of there being a large number of bouncy floors in the world as a result of these challenges. Instead, it is more likely that due to some discrepancies raised by practitioners, a high proportion of overly conservative floor designs could exist.”
“By building upon data sets and recalibrating design guides, these conservative practices (where unnecessary; unlike safety and char factors) could be reduced, converting challenges to opportunities, leading to more sustainable design practices and an optimisation of the used and available resources.”
Queensland-based Mr Faircloth will be one of hundreds of timber engineers, architects, developers, and researchers attending the World Conference on Timber Engineering in June, hosted for the first time in Brisbane.
Set to be one of the largest timber conferences on record, the Gottstein Trust is now offering six places for early-stage engineers to participate in this year’s WCTE: “We already have some applications, and interested people have until midnight March 30 to apply through the online form,” said Helen Murray, Principal of Kurrumbene Projects & Advocacy, whose team manages The Gottstein Trust.
- To learn more about the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Brisbane, click here for Wood Central’s report last year.
