Even before the building welcomes its first tenant, it incurs a huge carbon debt. Globally, the materials and structures required to construct buildings are responsible for 11% of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, According to to the World Green Building Council.
Experiments with multi-story wood buildings have begun in some places, and although they have recently reached recent heights, wood buildings will not replace skyscrapers any time soon. However, one Chilean startup believes that wood can still find its place.
“We are more interested in hybrid buildings,” Andrés Mitnik, co-founder and CEO of Strong by Form, told TechCrunch. His company has developed a recent structural timber product that may replace concrete and steel in structural ceilings, enabling architects to design lighter buildings with lower carbon emissions. The company was a finalist in the Top 20 Startup Battlefield and is attending the TechCrunch Disrupt conference going down this week in San Francisco.
The secret lies in the way these floor slabs are made. “We think we can shape wood in a way that no one else has done before,” he said.
Strong by Form designed a structural floor element that may extend longer distances than existing structural wood, replacing steel or concrete. At the same time, the product is lighter than all three.
Outside, builders will see something familiar. “When the contractor receives it, they see the CLT [cross-laminated timber] slab,” Mitnik said. “All the connections, the structural system, all the processes on site work exactly as if you were using CLT, so you do not have to learn recent things.”
But inside, as an alternative of more solid wood like in CLT, the structure is filled with cavities. Wood chips were pressed into a corrugated board optimized to hold heavy loads.
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The corrugated panel looks like oriented strand board, or OSB, which is common in workplaces. Strong by Form has developed software and manufacturing techniques that help you adjust the size and orientation of wood flakes held together using a glue-like binder. “It’s kind of like next-generation OSB, if you want to think about it that way,” Mitnik said.
Using the natural form and strengths of wood, Strong by Form built structural wooden floors that now span 10 meters (roughly 33 feet). Most CLT floors can only extend half this distance.
All this technology is not free, but Mitnik said the higher costs of the engineered wood product will be offset by its lighter weight.
“The idea is to create something so light that it allows for overall optimization of the structure,” he said. Lighter floors mean less steel and concrete in the frame, lowering the overall cost of the building. “With the additional savings, we are able to achieve a price comparable to concrete.”
Strong by Form tests its 10-foot panel, ensuring it meets the fire and load rankings required by structural engineers.
It will then organize a Series A round value $10 million to build a pilot factory where the first elements intended for business implementation will be produced.
Meanwhile, Strong by Form has also developed a three-millimeter-thick panel that is intended for ending relatively than structural tasks. The startup is working with train manufacturers to make use of its gently undulating panel in the interior of trains, where it could possibly soften the aesthetics of carriage partitions and ceilings while reducing their weight.
“Thanks to this, we were capable of finance all research and development work [research and development] required to do the floors, and that is what we really need to scale because that is where the impact will be,” Mitnik said.