Compass Engineering SRL

The idea stems from two observations: 1) In current collective residential buildings, designers often need to add mass for acoustic reasons to meet acoustic criteria. This additional load leads to larger volumes of wood to be implemented. Most old apartment buildings in cities have wooden floors, and the acoustics between units are generally unsatisfactory. Designers then turned to acousticians to find a solution to this problem, and the solution often implemented is to replace wood with concrete to increase mass and, consequently, improve acoustic performance. Current designers who wish to build with wood face the same problem and add mass in the form of non-structural screeds, generally to address the issue. Unfortunately, this leads to larger volumes of wood to be implemented. 2) In the design of timber beams or floors, the stability engineer checks several criteria. For common cases, it’s not the strength of rupture but rather the stiffness to deformation of wood that is most constraining and requires increasing the volume of wood. We observe in old barns wooden beams that have been in place for many years with a very small section, yet these beams are not in a state of rupture. This is because wood deforms a lot before breaking. Some woods have higher resistances than certain concretes made in situ. With Timber Clay, the concept optimizes our precious wood resource by proposing to collaborate two materials: wood and clay. This fruitful collaboration increases stiffness and thus limits deformations while directly improving acoustic properties. In summary, Timber Clay offers: The mass of clay that provides acoustic properties. The stiffness to deformation of wood and clay working together. The mechanical resistance of wood providing safety and serenity.

A new solution for bio-based structural buildings