Mass timber (MT) offers viable eco-conscious solutions within the building industry, with its high strength ratings, dimensional stability, light weight and renewable nature enhancing its status as a low carbon alternative to conventional building materials like steel and concrete. Moisture intrusion, coupled with the inherent organic nature of wood pose...
The engineering community is increasingly moving towards the design of seismic force-resisting systems that limit post-earthquake damage and reduce downtime to increase urban resiliency. For example, structural spines can be used to provide an elastic load path to impose a more uniform drift distribution with building height, thereby reducing the...
This thesis consists of three manuscripts related to the methodology of evaluating charring behavior in cross laminated lumber panel specimens subjected to fire performance tests on cross-laminated lumber panel specimens. The topic of the first manuscript is the measurement of char rates of unprotected CLT layups fabricated with ponderosa pine...
Includes Partial Least Squares Regression and Univariate Linear model RStudio code and results in PDF form for each of the three specimen populations scanned by two different light sources. Also included is a generalized PDF document and RMarkdown document for predicting percent wood failure.
Structural engineered wood manufacturers need a quantitative measurement technique to determine the ratio of wood to adhesive failure in their shear specimens. Visual estimation of percent wood failure has long stood as an extremely subjective quality control approach according to ASTM D5266 – Standard Practice for Estimating the Percentage of...
Conflicts and disasters displace millions of populations worldwide. There is a need for rapid and affordable housing to cater to the needs of the displaced and unhoused population. Experience from previous post-disaster responses shows that temporary housing should be rapidly deployable, planned for months to years, and should be environmentally...
In the search to improve and incorporate nano and renewable materials into urea-formaldehyde (UF), several researchers have incorporated cellulose nano fibrillated (CNF) into the adhesive. This study aimed to find an optimal way of incorporating CNF into UF and understand how CNF interacts with and changes the properties of the...
Restoration programs effectively prevent or mitigate wildfires and pest outbreaks in the forest lands. The most common approach is to selectively harvest smaller and dead trees in order to preserve larger and superior trees. Ponderosa pine, Pinus ponderosa, (PP) lumber is one of the common species harvested from restoration programs...
With growing interest in mass timber, especially mass timber panels (MTP), there has been a need to better understand their structural properties. One of the most versatile uses for MTP are as floor systems. Under new code provisions, these floors can be utilized in new and taller building types, but...
Post-tensioned (PT) self-centering shear walls were designed to reduce structural damage from seismic activity. However, these lateral force resistant systems experience post-tension loss negatively affecting the re-centering capability due to delayed deformations experienced by engineered wood products over time. The long-term mechanical response of mass-timber panels to in-plane PT loads...
Timber-concrete composite (TCC) solutions originated in the early twentieth century. There has been a renewed interest in TCC solutions in modern mass timber buildings, especially for floor systems. However due to lack of data, design standards, and code acceptance, TCC solutions require that new mass timber solutions be tested, and...
Spraying of liquid adhesive onto wood surfaces has shown to be a highly effective and efficient method of application across many different wood-based composite industries. However, the dynamics of spraying are extremely variable and distribution can be affected by liquid properties (rheology, molecular weight distribution, and temperature), application parameters (disk...
Civil engineers are aware of the impacts of structures on the global environment but the environmental impacts of a fire within these structures remains unknown. Fires present a unique hazard as it is difficult to predict the probability of the occurrence and the intensity. Traditional methods to identify the environmental...
Forest composition in Paraguay has been in a state of change for the past half century due to land management practices, forest fragmentation, and deforestation for agriculture. How these factors affect dendrological diversity and wood anatomy in Paraguay is not well understood. This thesis documents Paraguayan forest composition on the...
As a new product patented by Freres Lumber Company in 2018, little information exists for manu-facturing procedures of mass plywood panels (MPP). At first glance, MPP may appear to be ply-wood, laminated veneer lumber (LVL), or similar to conventional cross-laminated timber (CLT). Often manufacturers, as well as users, of MPP...
Equipment and technology suppliers to the US forest sector are confronting challenges and opportunities to meet the need for disruptive changes in an increasingly complex business environment. Open innovation is crucial for survival and success in the complex and changing operational environment due to its inherent openness and interdisciplinary nature....
Generally presented as a preferred social norm based on both ethical considerations and legislative demands, gender equality has been highly encouraged in recent years. For instance, The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 call out achieving gender equality and empowerment of women. However, although there are multiple efforts to...
This paper discusses elementary, and secondary (K-12) teachers’ perceptions of cross-reality (XR) tools for data visualization and use of sensor data from the built environment in classroom curricula. Our objective was to explore the use of sensor-informed XR in the built environment and civil engineering (BECE) field to support K-12...
Accelerated weathering (AW) tests have become a requirement for many wood composite products. This project monitored temperature and moisture content of specimens undergoing AW exposure for the following standards: ASTM D3434 (automatic boil test), CSA O112.9 (boil-dry-freeze), and PS2 (Section 7.17, 6-cycle VPS). Each AW procedure was conducted with three...