Sweden currently has a significant housing shortage. The latest forecast from the National board of housing states that 700,000 apartments must be built between the years 2016 and 2025. Properly used structural timber is a useful, affordable and renewable material with a high industrial potential with regard to housing construction and with high potential to enhance the environmental impact from the industry. In Sweden, there is a great interest in exploring new ways of using wood as load-bearing material in different types of multi-storey houses. A strong desire from producing companies is to develop the industrial production of prefabricated volumetric elements through technological development and streamlining of today's processes. This should be done so that the entire market segment of housing is covered. Today, up to about 4 floors are built with this type of construction type and the aim is to enable construction up to 10 floors. If such high-rise housing construction in the future can be produced industrially with architecturally flexible volumetric construction, it is reasonable to see a significantly reduced environmental impact in the construction industry.
The planned work within the framework of the application in question aims to further develop a innovative and industrialized building concept that is controlled by a digitized high quality process starting from the idea and continuing to the completed building. This is done by developing modern computational tools and validating them against experimental full-scale experiments. Most of the work will be carried out at Karlstad University, Linnaeus University and at the research institute RISE. In order to maintain a high industrial relevance through the project, three market-leading producers (Derome, OBOS and Moelven Byggmodul) also participate, their aim being to develop knowledge about each building system respectively in order to reach new market segments with their products.
Project leader: Johan Vessby, Karlstad Universitet