Seeing the Dust for the Trees: Integrative Modelling of Timber Co-products for Design-to-Fabrication Workflows

By mapping material properties that influence mechanical performance across the timber resource at a high spatial resolution and matching them to digitally simulated performance demands in designed glulam elements (Fig. 1), workflows such as the RawLam Experiments hint towards the ability to use material stocks usually unemployed in glulam manufacturing. However, the broader implications of this highly tailored and selective process remain to be quantitatively evaluated, examining the increase in timber resource used for construction and addressing how waste generation in the RawLam process is measured against established glulam fabrication methods. The paper presents possible scenarios for an industrial scale-up of the process and an evaluation of the co-product cascade associated to each scenario. Findings on the cascade variations are then leveraged to put in place a new version of the RawLam allocation procedure. This paper reveals the key differences between the standard sawmilling and glulam production process and the RawLam method in terms of the specific production steps involved and the resultant impacts on co-product ratios. This enables an evaluation of the perceived benefits of the RawLam approach to design modelling glulam blanks against broader metrics of economic value and carbon sequestration. As part of a larger effort to integrate a wider segment of the timber value chain into architectural design processes, this work demonstrates how industry-relevant indicators such as the value impacts of the co-product cascade can help steer the design modelling of engineered timber elements.