Master of Engineering Projects
List of Projects
Lateral Deflection Performance of Wood Shear Walls Built with Insulated Sheathing (Rui Liu)
Wood-frame construction is commonly used in residential and commercial buildings in North America. As demand for energy-efficient construction rises, a light wood frame shear wall built with a layer of insulation inserted between the sheathing and framing members is gaining increasing attention. The main objective of this research is to evaluate the validity of the current code-based approach, originally developed for conventional shear walls, for calculating the load-deflection responses of wood shear walls built with insulated sheathing.
Development of Mass Timber Panel-Concrete Composite Floor Span Table (Jialin Li)
An increasingly popular composite floor system consists of a Mass Timber Panel (MTP) connected to a concrete slab or topping with mechanical connectors such as Self-Tapping Screws (STS) and a sound insulation layer in between. The concrete topping provides not only structural functions, but also help to enhance acoustic and fire performances. To facilitate the design of these floor systems that meet the criteria of strength, deflection, vibration, acoustics, and fire, pre-determined allowable spans in the format of a table will be beneficial. This report presents the procedure to develop a span table showing allowable spans for specific combinations of timber panel size and grade, concrete thickness, and connection properties.
Cross Laminated Timber Reinforced with Carbon Fibre (Xinlei Cao)
Although engineered wood products such as glued laminated timber (glulam) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) have successfully eliminated the flaws inherently exist in conventional wood products, they are still not comparable with steel and concrete in terms of strength and stiffness. Among all different options for reinforcement, Carbon Fibre is relatively popular due to its high tensile strength, low weight, and easy installation. This study presents an analysis of flexural stiffness and stress distributions of CLT panels reinforced with carbon fibre mats, based on an analytical method and finite element method (FEM).
Timber Outrigger Structures (Syed Lakhani)
The concept of outrigger in buildings follows the same principle of boat assembly that is to couple perimeter and internal structures together to resist the lateral load. This project aims to determine the optimum number and location of the outriggers in a timber building. For this purpose, six fictitious 20 - storey timber buildings were analyzed. Each structure was modeled on the same footprints, but the number and location of the outrigger and belt truss floors were different in each building. Each building was analyzed against the EL-Centro earthquake and wind load. The results of the overturning moment and lateral displacement due to earthquake and wind load and base reactions from time history response were studied to determine the lateral stiffness, optimum location, and the number of the outrigger floors.
State-Of-The-Art Report on Seismic Behavior of Metal Connections in CLT Shear Wall Systems (Andy Ha)
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) is an innovative engineered wood product being acknowledged and utilized around the world and is pushing the height limitations of mass timber constructions. Shear walls built with cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels are an attractive system to resist seismic load in tall buildings due to their low weight. Given that the seismic performance of these CLT shear walls is largely governed by the connection behaviour, in this report, a critical review of past studies on CLT shear wall systems and the behaviour of their connections, including hold-down, angle brackets and panel joints, is presented.