Even before the building receives its first occupant, it has created a steep carbon debt. Worldwide, the materials and construction required for building construction contribute 11% of global carbon emissions, According to to the World Green Building Council.
Some places are starting to experiment with wooden buildings, and while they are now reaching heights, wooden buildings are not going to replace Skyscrapers anytime soon. But one Chilean startup thinks there is still room for wood to find a place.
“We are moving more towards hybrid buildings,” Andrés Mitnik, co-founder and CEO Strong in formtold techcrunch. His company has developed a new designed wood product that can replace concrete and steel in structural floors, allowing architects to design lighter, less carbon buildings. The company is Battle Starup Top 20 finists and display TechCrunch is annoyingwhich runs this week in San Francisco.
The secret is in how many floor plates. “We think we can shape wood in a way that no one else has before,” he said.
Strong with form has designed a structural piece that can go further than the existing wood, as a substitute for steel or concrete. At the same time, the product is lighter than all three.
Outside, the craftsman will see something familiar. “When contractors get it, they look at timber (laminated timber),” Mitnik said. “All connections, construction systems, all processes on site like you use CLT, so there is no need to learn anything new.”
But inside, instead of solid wood, like you find in CLT, the structure is filled with cavities. The wood shavings have been pressed into a wavy board that is optimized to generate heavy loads.
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Wavy panels look like oriented strand board, or OSB, which is common on job sites. But strong with the form of software and manufacturing techniques to tweak the size and alignment of wood flakes held with a binder like glue. “This is the next type of OSB, if you want to think of it that way,” Mitnik said.
By using the natural shape and strength, strong with the shape has created a wooden structural floor that is now taken 10 meters (about 33 feet). Most CLT floors can only cover half that distance.
All of the technology isn’t free, but Mitnik says the higher cost of engineered wood products can be offset by the lighter weight.
“The idea is to make something that’s light so you have that structural optimization,” he said. A lighter floor means less steel and concrete in the frame, which lowers the overall building cost. “With these additional savings, we can achieve price realization with concrete.”
Strong in form is a 10 meter panel test, ensuring that it meets the fire and load ratings required by structural engineers.
Next, it will add a series of rounds targeted at a price of $ 10 million to build a pilot plant to produce the first pieces for commercial deployment.
In the meantime, strong in form has also created a three-millimeter thick panel meant to complete rather than structural tasks. The startup is working with train manufacturers to use weak panels inside trains, where they can reduce the aesthetics of the car’s walls and ceilings while reducing mass.
“That has allowed us to fund all the R&D (research) needed to do the floor, which is what we want to scale, because of that impact,” Mitnik said.
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