Abstract
Building constructions contribute a significant portion to the global consumption of energy and emissions of Greenhouse Gas (GHG). Around 11% of total GHG is attributed by the Embodied Carbon (EC): the energy that is needed to source, transport, process, manufacture, and assemble buildings. A rising interest in sustainable construction processes and renewable materials since the 1980-90s has led to improvements and innovations in timber construction. In its natural state, wood poses weaknesses that may cause challenges in its mechanical properties and functionality. This includes strength reduction and a sudden brittle failure, which restricted or marginalized the use of this material in construction in the course of industrialization. In the past decades, innovations such as Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) and other manufacturing methods for Mass Engineered Timber (MET) have made wood a serious alternative to carbon intensive and non-renewable materials such as concrete and steel. More recently there have been developments to manufacture engineered wood components using wood fibers. The combination of the natural timber reinforced with high-performance carbon fibers and the question if the naturally organized fibers can be improved with strategically placed synthetic fibers drove this thesis. A remaining challenge here was how suitable mechanisms of fiber reinforcement can be designed for timber beams as an approach towards creating a sustainable yet structurally capable composite. This research aims at designing various reinforcements of timber beams by using carbon fibers, and thereafter analyzing its structural properties and its suitability for an application ranging from the construction phase of a building to disassembly. Using timber as the core component and strategically enhancing it with fibers provides potential applications for composite technologies to access the construction industries. In initial stages, we examined if beams could become more effective when proper reinforcement mechanisms are used to strengthen the timber elements, particularly with high performance fibers. To further concretize this conception, 3-point bending tests were performed on samples from designed mechanism. As expected, the results from experiments portrayed that timber could display approximately up to 45% higher bearing capacity with good reinforcement mechanisms compared to its unreinforced state. This research has shown that the composite fiber reinforced timber required a lesser iii amount of stress to create a same amount of strain compared to its unreinforced state when timber is reinforced with carbon fibers. This behavior is known as pseudo-ductility and allows the composite to portray metal-like ductility property. This allows for more productive use of all the parts of beams, particularly around compression areas prior to tensile rupture. The resulting fiber-reinforced timber beams has enormous, combined advantages (sustainability from timber and mechanical strength supported by fibers) and reduced disadvantages such as reduction of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions from the construction process hence reducing the Global Warming Potential (GWP) in a bigger picture