Abstract
Housing in modern societies is a priority need. In the countries of industrial development, there are very sharp contrasts with respect to the housing deficit, affecting the great majority of the families with lower economic resources that solve their problem through subhuman constructions, elaborated, mostly, with residues of construction and disassembly of old buildings, highlighting the importance of the economy, from the financial point of the house built on the architectural quality and comfort. The need to create new building systems based on wood for homes arises when considering the few existing alternatives in developing countries that guarantee an economic, massive and fundamentally sustainable construction. In this sense, this research aims to make a contribution to the implementation of new structural elements for the sustainable construction of wooden houses, which can be manufactured by low technology processes, allowing easy use and appropriation by the general population. The system is called TENSO-WOOD, which is conceived as a system of solid wood plates of Caribbean pine, developed by means of low technology processes that allow an easy appropriation by the population in general. This paper presents a frame structural system using tensioned wood panels as structural elements. It is a lightweight prefabrication system for the construction of two-storey wooden houses. The system consists of bolted wood elements, creating different structural panels such as beam and column. An experimental program was carried out, which allowed knowing the mechanical behavior of each panel of the frame structure. In addition, it permits to know their maximum stress and deformations. The numerical models were compared with the experimental tests to validate and calibrate some parameters in the simulations. Therefore, the numerical models can be able to compute the load capacity and deformation of the wooden elements, obtaining behavior curves.
Highlights
Wood is used in the construction of buildings under a wide variety of formats that include products of greater or lesser degree of transformation, which coexist and are in force at present
Among the different prefabricated timber building systems for housing are the so-called mass timber systems, made up of large elements manufactured by joining sawn timber together by different means, whether they are adhesives, nails or dowels (Harte, 2017)
This paper proposes a new sustainable timber building system of, potentially, massive production for affordable housing in Latin America countries named Tenso-Wood System
Summary
Wood is used in the construction of buildings under a wide variety of formats that include products of greater or lesser degree of transformation, which coexist and are in force at present. When proposing a novel system, questions arise about its structural behaviour under service loads and seismic forces, as well as the construction techniques used for the conformation of the components, and in this way comply with an affordable housing design requirement In this sense, were necessary to carry out a proof of concept through experimental tests and it is necessary to carry out numerical simulations of the system components, to calibrate parameters and to validate the behaviour of the structures composed by elements of TensoWood System. Considering the housing deficit in Latin America, the project seeks the validation of a proposed prefabricated timber building system for affordable housing These system consist of laminated wood panel manufactured based on slats of Caribbean Pine joined through bolts. In this sense, the approach to new proposals must take into account the use of the limited technological resources that most of these countries have in this matter. This pine has physical-mechanical properties very similar to other wood species of the same genus used in other regions of the Americas such as Radiata Pine in Chile and Eliotis Pine in Argentina, Uruguay (PADT-REFORT, 1984)
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