Integrated Computer Models for Next generation Engineered Wood Products

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Engineered wood products (EWPs) encompass an important class of reconstituted lumber and panel products derived from wood, including: cross laminated timber (CLT), parallel strand lumber (PSL), laminated veneer lumber (LVL), oriented strand lumber (OSL), and oriented strand board (OSB). Unlimited by the original size and attributes of logs, these materials are playing an increasingly important role in the creation of next generation green buildings. The 18-storey wood building on UBC campus is a good example of how natural materials can be engineered and manufactured to satisfy the structural and safety requirements of tall buildings. Other products such as PSL, LVL, OSL and OSB have been more commonly used in residential and commercial buildings. The sustainable manufacturing and applications of these products in Canada necessitate ongoing R&D, mill process optimization and product development. This proposed research program aims at developing integrated computer models to transform the way EWPs are developed, manufactured and applied. Researchers, mill production personnel and building designers can all benefit from such models by minimizing the lengthy, costly laboratory experiments and risky mill trials. Focusing on strand-based EWPs, the objectives of this work are two folds: 1) to further develop individual machine centre modules (MCMs), and 2) to develop a computational platform to integrate MCMs for a complete plant-wide process model. The work will be built on my previous models which simulate manufacturing operations and material characteristics in individual machine centres. Work on the sub-models or MCMs will entail investigation of fundamental principles about wood composite processing, coding for numerical solutions and visualizations, and design of experiments to characterize material properties for model inputs and output validations. For integration, a material flow model will be created that can simulate the transformations of material structure and properties in both time and space domains, and can link input and output variables from all the MCMs in a harmonized platform using state-of-the art computational software.  This work can lead to accelerated and cost-effective efforts in R&D, mill process optimization and new product development. Research shows that in a typical OSB mill in Canada, process optimization, for example, can lead to potential $10 million/year savings by reducing defeat products by half, reducing fines generation by 2% and reducing downtime by 2%. Close collaboration with industry is expected throughout this project which will offer great training opportunities for HQP. Two Ph.D students and 2-3 PDFs will be trained and can be employed in the resource sector that currently faces serious shortage of labour especially skilled workers.