Building a Wood-Concrete Floor Mockup Bench

Building a Wood-Concrete Floor Mockup Bench

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
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. The floors...
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Clouston co-authors book chapter on laminated bio-based composites

Clouston co-authors book chapter on laminated bio-based composites

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
A recently published book titled "Bio-Based Composites for High-Performance Materials: From Strategy to Industrial Application" (published by CRC press) includes a chapter on "Characterization and Strength Modeling of Laminated Bio-Based Composites", which was co-authored by BCT-faculty Peggi L. Clouston, Sanjay R. Arwade, and Alireza Amini. See below for an excerpt on Google Books: Link: http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781482214482...
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Clouston hosts Girls Inc. Eureka! summer workshop

Clouston hosts Girls Inc. Eureka! summer workshop

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
Helping girls excel in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), Clouston worked with eighth graders on bridge construction during a workshop sponsored by Girls Inc. Eureka! They built and broke models of truss bridges while learning about forces and how material can be placed in special patterns to make stronger structures. More information: http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2013/07/post_392.html...
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Schreyer tests Live Oak wood for Smithsonian Channel’s show

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
As part of a documentary on the background behind Peter Weir's maritime masterpiece, "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.", Alexander Schreyer (Lecturer and Assistant Program Director in BCT) conducted several tests on Live Oak, a wood species that gave the USS Constitution the nickname "Old Ironsides". In these tests, which were filmed by the production company Blink Films UK, he compared bending properties of Live Oak to White Oak, a common shipbuilding material at the time. A second series of tests of these materials under impact loading yielded good results but was not chosen to be part of the documentary. While originally produced for the Smithsonian Channel, the episode has in the meantime been shown in many international markets. For example, the image below shows a still taken from German news television station n-tv. For more on the episode, visit the Smithsonian Channel's website....
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