August 2018

The World Conference on Timber Engineering – WCTE is the world’s premier forum for presenting and discussing the latest technical and architectural developments and innovations in wood or timber construction.

This year’s 15th WCTE conference was held between 20th August and 23rd August in Seoul, Korea. The event brought together more than 600 participants and different experts from engineers to architects, researchers, educators, and manufactures in the field of timber engineering.

WCTE conference. Image: Iztok Šušteršič

Image: Iztok Šušteršič

Among the participants there were also 3 representatives from our research institute. InnoRenew CoE’s researcher Dr Václav Sebera presented results of his research about fracture properties of thermally modified wood. His work that was created in cooperation with colleagues from Spain and the Czech Republic showed that thermally modified wood is much more sensitive to crack development and propagation in shear mode than native wood. Dr Iztok Šušteršič, the Research group leader in Sustainable Building with Renewable Materials gave a talk about cross laminated ribbed plates, a product that was recently also awarded the Puch prize in Slovenia, one of the most recognisable innovation awards. The new product can save up to 50 % of timber compared to existing solutions while having equal structural performance and production costs.

Assistant Researcher and Project Manager at the InnoRenew CoE Barbara Rovere presented a case study on timber construction as a solution to cost-optimization of nearly-zero energy buildings (NZEBs): “The upcoming introduction of the NZEB standard will represent a significant challenge for the European construction industry. With our research, we want to highlight timber as the construction material of choice in securing the supply of cost-effective NZEBs for the European market. Second, the case study demonstrates the added value of timber, since wooden buildings are better able to address the challenge of sustainability.” The case study research is based on the innovative small-scale sports building, developed by Alfa Natura Ltd, a Slovenian SME and member of the InnoRenew CoE Living Lab.

Barbara Rovere at the WCTE conference. Image: Iztok Šušteršič

Their presentations were positively accepted by the audience. We are looking forward to the next conference in Chile.