CROSS LAMINATED TIMBER (CLT)
Concrete of the Future!
Concrete, an essential building material, has for decades offered us the possibility of shaping our cities quickly and effectively, allowing them to rapidly expand into urban peripheries and reach heights previously unimagined by mankind. Today, new timber technologies are beginning to deliver similar opportunities – and even superior ones – through materials like Cross-Laminated Timber
DESIGN FLEXIBILITY
CLT has many applications
Wall Panels
Roof Panels
Ceiling/Intermediate Floor Panels
The thickness of the panels can easily be increased by adding more layers and the length of the panels can be increased by joining panels together to meet building codes as well as thermal and acoustic requirements.
ECO-FRIENDLY
Green. Sustainable. Renewable
CLT is made out of renewable wood, it sequesters carbon, and does not require the burning of fossil fuels during production.
Despite all the renewable energy used in the extraction and manufacturing processes, emissions from wood construction will never match the amount of carbon that is kept "sequestered" in the CLT.
SPEED OF CONSTRUCTION
Prefabricated & Modular
Floors or walls made from CLT can be fully manufactured before reaching the job site. CLT behaves with the precision of a piece of furniture, working with margins of error of 2 millimeters.
While the planning & manufacturing stages can take a little longer, the assembly is of an amazing speed: in the case of a house of 200 m2, the assembly can take 5 days and occupy a minimum workforce (around 4 instructed people).
STRUCTURAL BRILLIANCE
Structurally, Thermally, Acoustically - Sound
It delivers at minimum the same structural strength as reinforced concrete, but it's a material with a high degree of flexibility that has to undergo great deformations to break and collapse – unlike concrete.
Moreover, 1 m3 of concrete weighs approximately 2.7 tons, while 1 m3 of CLT weighs 400 kg and has the same resistance. The same goes for steel.
Physically, to achieve the same degree of insulation that a 100 mm thick CLT wall would afford, we would need to build a concrete wall 1.80 m thick (1/18 ratio).
FIRE RESISTANT
Surprised? You Shouldn't Be
During a fire resistance test of a 5-ply cross-laminated timber (CLT) panel wall, the panel was subjected to temperatures exceeding 980 C and lasted 3 hours and 6 minutes.
During fires, exposed mass timber chars on the outside, which forms an insulating layer protecting interior wood from damage
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