To showcase Mass Timber as a viable structural option at project inception stages. WSP, working for their client Forestry Innovation Investment, and working with costing partners, BTY Group, and peer reviewers Timber Engineering Inc., made use of computational design and engineering automation to develop an industry-leading conceptual design tool called TimberX. This tool is meant to equip Owners, Architects, and Developers with easy-to-digest data about the trade-offs of various structural systems, enabling better decision-making which has the promise of reducing embodied carbon output in the AECOO industry.
The client, Forestry Innovation Investment (FII) of British Columbia, has a mission to help create, maintain, and diversify markets for BC’s world-class, environmentally friendly forest products. In doing so, FII requisitions various studies into the feasibility of mass timber construction to move the industry in this direction. One of the concerns is that timber is often “off-ramped” at very early project stages due to apparent misconceptions about the structural ramifications of its use (too costly, takes up too much structural depth, etc.). In the scope of this work, WSP was retained to create a tool to educate Owners, Architects, and Developers on the trade-offs and equip them with data that can be used in early-stage decision-making.
With the primary goal being to educate Owners, Architects and Developers, by providing easy-to-digest data for informed decision-making, WSP set out to create TimberX. A simple web-based interface was developed to visually compare the structural options on the 4 key metrics relevant to building Owners (cost per square metre, embodied carbon per square metre, structural depth, and bay weight). A simple 3D model of the structural system with material layers is also provided. This allows the tool’s user base to get a good sense of what they might expect the structural system to look like even when just conceptualizing a building before involving a structural engineer. Results are not biased towards or against any given system, with an equal ranking given to each of the 4 metrics. To create transparency, a detailed user guide is also provided including the unit cost rates (provided by BTY group) and the embodied carbon unit rates (provided by WSP), allowing any user of the tool to understand the results shown and try to find ways to improve while not making the interface difficult to use and digest.
To develop this tool, WSP needed to perform thousands of conceptual-level structural design optimizations to build out a database of acceptable single-floor bay structural solutions for 4 sectors (residential, long-term care, office/school, and flexible loading condition), 9 structural system types, and a range of bay sizes (ranging from 3 x 3 to 10 x 10). The resulting 8,100 solutions in the database were also to be ranked based on bay weight, structural depth, cost per square metre, and embodied carbon per square metre.
To be confident in the 8,100 structural options provided in the final database, automation was required to analyze several more thousand options through conventional structural analysis softwares. This was done to ensure the solution presented in the tool is reasonably optimized for the given set of parameters. Excel/VBA-based “controllers” for various structural software Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) were developed to streamline the analysis of these thousands of options. Once the 8100 optimized designs were completed, Grass,hopper scripts were developed to take these and produce 3D object files and apply a material layer for viewing in the final tool; an important step in allowing the end-user to visualize the structural solutions. Finally, the excel-based working database of 8,100 optimized solutions was then converted to an SQL database built into the back-end of the web interface, including the 3D object files.
Node.js is used to create an appealing front-end that displays the solutions rapidly, a feature that is crucial to the overall user experience.
The State of Mass Timber in Canada 2021 report produced by the Green Construction through Wood program stated that the Mass Timber industry currently made up 484 structures or approximately 1.5 million square metres of gross floor area as of 2021. The Government of BC’s Mass Timber Action Plan (2022) stated that expansion of the Mass Timber industry would create new opportunities for jobs in all parts of the province, including up to 2,400 new jobs across new production plants, and in construction and design roles.
Also, as of 2021, the AECOO industry contributed to 39% of Canada’s carbon emissions, 11% of which can be attributed to embodied carbon. WSP’s internal studies performed in 2022 have shown that a Mass Timber solution would contain up to 40% less embodied carbon per square metre of floor area when compared to conventional structural steel.
As TimberX is meant to provide a simple resource for decision-makers to understand the trade-offs in structural systems, the hope is that it can contribute to driving the desired change in the industry as a part of a suite of solutions and knowledge developed by FII and other entities.
The focus of this submission is the digital innovation that went into creating TimberX and how these innovations were used to create an easy-to-digest and unbiased interface, providing knowledge and data to decision-makers on structural trade-offs between Mass Timber and other structural systems at early project stages. In the first 5 weeks from the website launch in June 2023, 375+ unique users visited the site and performed 4.5+ events on the tool on average. In time, and as other resources become available to further educate on Mass Timber, the impact of TimberX as a useful tool and as a conversation starter on the decarbonization of the industry will continue to grow.
