As part of their independent studies, two BCT students, Henry Braley and Loran Kaleci (with help from fellow student Rommel Cordova-Fiori and shop manager Dan Pepin), this semester built an 8 ft bench for Holdsworth Hall. This bench (while arguably extremely overdesigned) serves as a mockup of the wood-concrete composite floor construction that will be in the new (Integrated) Design Building. As shown in the diagram below, it consists of a three-layer cross-laminated timber (CLT) slab, which we generously received from Nordic EWP (thanks!). Above it is a 3/4 inch layer of rigid insulation and a 3 inch cast-in-place concrete topping. The concrete and the wood layers are connected rigidly with glued-in shear “HBV” connectors by TiComTec from Germany (thanks for those, too!), making both act as a single composite element.

If you want to learn more about this technology, check out this research spotlight. BCT has been researching this technology for quite a while now and we are excited to see it in a real building on campus soon.

CLT Bench

The floors in the (I)DB will span much further (25 feet) and consist of 5- and 7-layer CLT slabs, but the structural principle behind them can already be seen in this mockup. You will also notice in the pictures below that we took some liberty with the fasteners. Because we hadn’t received the correct HBV fasteners in time, we improvised with half-flattened nailplates. The correct fasteners are shown in the last images in the gallery.

At this point the bench is finished. Drop by anytime (third floor of the Design Building next to room 318) to check it out.

Gallery

You can also watch the “striped shirt gang” pour the concrete in this timelapse: