Bigger Than a Woodchip: The Art of Building Materials

This session will focus on innovative mass timber building structures.

Dr. Marco Lo Ricco, Research General Engineer, will introduce a few examples of mass timber research at the Forest Products Laboratory and moderate a panel of speakers to include:

Dr. Shiling Pei, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado School of Mines and principal investigator of a multi-institutional earthquake research team, presenting the recently conducted Natural Hazard Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) TallWood seismic testing on the newly upgraded UC-San Diego shake table. The 10-story, full-scale mass timber structure set world records as the largest tests ever conducted on a shake table with 6 degrees of freedom to realistically simulate effects of historic earthquakes. In addition to setting records, the simulations proved that mass timber structures can resiliently withstand strong earthquakes by controlled rocking, a strategy that greatly reduces the need for repairs and exceeds building code minimum requirements for seismic safety.

Jordan Komp, Professional Engineer/Structural Engineer and Associate Principal of Thornton Tomasetti, presenting the benefits of engineered mass timber construction through exemplary projects, such as the 25-story Ascent (Milwaukee, WI) which the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat declared the world’s tallest hybrid concrete and mass timber multistory building at the time of its grand opening in July of 2022.

Mark Weaver, Structural Engineer and Principal of Karagozian & Case (Glendale, CA), presenting the development of mass timber structures for protective design applications with products such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels reinforced to mitigate blast damage, ballistic perforation, and forced entry. While protective design is critical to many governmental facilities, the performance of mass timber under extreme dynamic impulse loads has generally changed perceptions about the strength and versatility of timber structures to withstand a variety of hazards.