The anisotropic swelling and shrinking of wood can be taken as a basis for utilizing wood in a smart way. By manufacturing wood bilayers in a cross-ply manner, the dimensional changes can be translated into reversible shape changes such as bending, twisting or a combination of both (Reichert et al., 2015; Rueggeberg and Burgert, 2015). The curvature of such bilayers can be predicted by analytical as well as numerical simulations using appropriate material models (Hassani et al., 2015; Grönquist et al., 2018; Grönquist et al., 2019)
Here, we show the dimensional upscaling of wood bilayers to metre scale and demonstrate their use as an autonomous, solar controlled and driven motor element for climate adaptive building shells (Vailati et al., 2018) as well as basic element within an alternative manufacturing of highly curved cross-laminated timber (CLT) (Grönquist et al., 2019). Furthermore, we demonstrate the first application of this technology at building scale.
Keywords: wood bilayers, self-shaping, curved CLT (cross-laminated timber)
Authors
Markus Rüggeberg
ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Philippe Grönquist
Falk K. Wittel
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