Andre Barbosa
Oregon State University, OR·Engineering
Buildings made of cross-laminated timber (CLT), which are large panels glued from layers of wood laid at right angles, can now rise up to eighteen stories. They use domestic wood and can be built faster and with less waste than many alternatives.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
mass timber
cross-laminated timber
veneer-based CLT
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2029
What they work on
- Isolate gross shear, net shear, and combined shear-torsion failure modes in lumber-based and veneer-based cross-laminated timber panels, using the Universal Panel Tester's controlled biaxial and twisting loads.
- Develop a multimodal orthotropic shear field theory that assigns each wood layer its own crack angle and uses fracture mechanics to predict brittle cracking at inside corners.
- Validate the theory through subassembly tests of beams with openings and notches, joints, and multistory shear walls, and derive design adjustment factors compatible with national specifications.
More about the research
However, the design rules for spots where forces concentrate have not kept pace. Examples include the areas around door and window openings, notches in beams, and floor-to-wall connections. There, panels can split under bending, shear, or twisting, and current design relies on simplified empirical rules rather than an understanding of how the material actually fails.
Why it matters
Mass timber construction is growing fast, but engineers still lack mechanics-based rules for the weakest regions of timber panels. Validated models and design procedures could make tall wood buildings both safer and more economical. They could also strengthen national design standards and support forestry economies and the construction industry.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Thomas Gernay
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Engineering·Early-career
Derive accurate material models and properties for timber in realistic fires by analyzing recent fire test data with Bayesian inference and surrogate modeling.
Tara Hutchinson
University of California-San Diego, CA·Engineering
Test individual wall lines and building components of cold-formed steel framing to separate how designated shear walls, gravity walls, finishes and partitions each resist earthquake loads.
Xiaojia Zhang
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Engineering·Early-career
Test whether local constitutive behavior, meaning how a small region of material responds to force, links local structural deformation to global fracture, using theory and simulation of homogeneous, defected and heterogeneous metamaterial networks.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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