Project Lead: Arijit Sinha
 
The Mitigating Fire Concerns project is in collaboration with the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, which has a chamber to test elevated temperatures up to 330 degrees Celsius. In the lab, the project will take the connection systems from the Composite CLT-Concrete Floor Systems for Tall Building Design project and test them over elevated temperatures to evaluate strength properties as well as how the stiffness and strength degrade at different levels of elevated temperatures.
This information will be implemented into fire models and will help to predict things like failure time.
 

Project duration: 2018 - 2019

Objectives:

The objective of this proposed project is to characterize the shear performance of CLT connection systems under thermal loading. The research will be conducted in Richardson Hall and Owen Hall at Oregon State University.

The discovery project will lay a foundation for possible future work looking to create a database of performance of different connection systems and solutions under elevated temperature conditions that will be readily accessible, while developing robust fire endurance models. As part of this project, Woodworks will be involved as a stakeholder group. Every proposed strategy to provide a passive fire restraint to a CLT building is vetted by WoodWorks. In partnership with Woodworks, the PIs will identify and prioritize the solution in terms of research needs.

A key product from this project will be a graduate student trained in evaluating connections under extreme loading conditions and fire endurance modeling for tall wood structures. The student will be a future industry leader in this area and will take the field forward. The thesis projects of the supported student will be significant contributions to the current state-of-knowledge. The information generated will lead to the basis for a series of publications and technology transfer activities.