Concept Lab

If you are interested in the finale of our robobench project, please check out this video! This project was an excellent collaboration between Concept Lab and Dialog. We were able to divert several CLT panels from the landfill and turn them into beautiful and unique benches for each of our offices. Talk about upcycling! If you would like to see the bench in person, or discuss other aspects of robotics, prototyping, testing, or product development, please contact us at conceptlab@fastepp.com. Thanks!

Our shop was filled with a flurry of activity as we recently assembled several full-sized mockups of the PNE Amphitheatre connections in Concept Lab, and welcomed the project team to review and learn from the assemblies. We test fit the glulam-glulam splice connection for the main arches, as well as the glulam-keystone connection at the top of the arch. Each glulam arch is 1520mm (5ft) deep, and the components weighed ~1 ton each. It took a lot of muscle and ingenuity to get everything set up properly without an overhead crane! We also arranged 5 sections of the glulam arches on a 30-degree slope to represent a mid-arch section of the roof structure. A 3.5m x 3m CLT panel was placed on top of the beams to demonstrate the warping that will be required to fit the CLT on top of the doubly curved roof. The structure is so huge that the warping is relatively minor over a 3m span, and it was easy to cold bend the panel into place with partially threaded screws. These mockups will remain in Concept Lab for the next few weeks, and are being used for further lighting demonstrations, whitewash coating tests, roof membrane installation testing, and constructability review. If you would like to arrange a tour of Concept Lab to view the PNE Amphitheatre mockups in person, please reach out! Fast + Epp | EllisDon | Revery Architecture Inc. | Nordic Structures | WaltersGroup | Kinsol Timber Systems #Fabrication #PNE #glulam #masstimber #timberconstruction #architecture #structuraldesign #mockups #testing

We have been testing Wood-Plastic Composite (WPC) splines in Concept Lab in order to find a suitable spline material for mass timber construction that doesn't degrade and will never rust when exposed to water. WPC is mostly commonly used for residential decks where it is permanently exposed to the weather, so we were intrigued to test the material properties to determine its suitability as a structural spline. 📈 In the first graph below, 12 samples of plywood were compared with 12 samples of WPC with a single nail in shear for each test. The stiffness of the samples is similar, but the plywood had consistently higher strength and more ductility. We observed the nail head pulling into the surface of the plywood and bending at 2 interfaces, whereas the WPC was much stiffer and the nails only bent at the interface of the CLT substrate. 🚿 Next, we took those samples and alternated between soaking and drying for 2 days at a time over the course of 1 month. This simulates a realistic condition for mass timber construction -- but it is by no means a worst case scenario. For projects that are exposed for several months, we have repeatedly seen plywood splines needing to be torn out and replaced, which doubles the material costs and at least triples the labor costs! 📈 After soaking, all the splines were allowed to dry to < 19% MC, and the single fastener tests were repeated. In the second graph we note that the WPC splines are a bit stiffer and the average strength was equal to the plywood spline average strength, which had degraded 23% from the first round of testing. The nails through the plywood were still more ductile than through the WPC, as the WPC had the same behavior at the nail head that we observed in the first round of testing. These were promising initial results for the use of an alternative spline material, and we will share the next steps next week!

Over the past few weeks we have had fun prototyping unique stair tread designs for the new feature stair in Fast + Epp's main atrium. Tobias Fast and Kent Theobert Pretorius have led the geometry generation, by optimizing the force flow as a Michell truss and then 3D printing a series of prototypes based on the truss designs. We then began milling full size mock ups from plywood, so we carved away the portions of the stair tread that had the lowest stress to create a very interesting final shape. You've never seen a cantilever stair tread like this before! Of course it is always nice to load test your designs, so after jumping on the treads we will also break them on the self-reacting test frame in Concept Lab to ensure the failure mechanism is well understood. There is still a bit more sculpting and refining to do before we arrive on the final shape, but we would love to hear your thoughts on the design so far! 👇

We are pleased to announce that Concept Lab and DIALOG will present our finished freeform #robobench during Design Vancouver Festival on September 22! Register here: https://lnkd.in/guY_xGkH Please join us to learn about the upcycling of CLT cutoffs, and how we envision using construction materials to divert them from the waste stream. 👍 Location:    ➡ Fast + Epp Headquarters ➡ 397 W. 7th Avenue, Vancouver BC Time: ➡ Sunday, Sep 22 ➡ 10am – 2pm #CLT #robotics #freeform #DesignVancouverFestival #upcycle #circulareconomy

📽️ 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞: 𝐒𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐈𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐓𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐯𝐬. 𝐆𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 This video presents a comparison between two connection methods used in CLT panels to provide continuity in the minor direction: spline plate with inclined self-tapping screws (S1) and glued spline (S2). Both connections involve two plywood sheets attached to the bottom of the CLT panels, matching the thickness of the removed CLT layer. The key difference lies in the connection method: •    𝐒𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐈𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐓𝐒: 12 screws on each side (Ø8×160 mm, fully threaded), installed at a 45-degree angle. •   𝐆𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞: Adhesion between the plywood and CLT surface. The specimens were tested with off-center connections under three-point loading at Concept Lab, and the results represent the average values from six replicates: 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒓                       𝑺1                     𝑺2 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 𝑽ᵤₗₜ (𝒌𝑵/𝒎)                         125                       96         𝑴ᵤₗₜ (𝒌𝑵𝒎/𝒎)                      55                      44        𝑪ᵩ  (𝒌𝑵𝒎𝒓𝒂𝒅⁻¹𝒎⁻¹)           11,000             54,000    ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The findings highlight that while the glued spline, with its significant rotational stiffness, offers a viable solution to address serviceability requirements, it exhibits a brittle failure mode. This brittleness may be a drawback from a structural performance perspective, especially when compared to the spline with inclined STS, which may provide more ductile behavior. #structuralengineering #masstimber #connection #TimberConstruction

We’re thrilled to unveil the stainless steel mold box for our first TCN project! Our TCNs (Timber Concrete Nodes) will be crafted by Szolyd Concrete Corp in Victoria, with the stainless steel parts that were expertly fabricated by Metalcraft Technology Inc in Coquitlam. Once the UHPC components are complete, they’ll head to Fast + Epp for rigorous destructive testing in our Concept Lab. The remaining TCNs will be dispatched to the new community center project, where they’ll serve as a cutting-edge alternative to traditional metal hangers in post and beam connections. Exciting times ahead for our new product line! #UHPC #masstimber #postandbeam #TCN #productdevelopment #productdesign #stainlesssteel #fabrication #innovation #prototyping

❓When joining mass timber panels what spline material won’t rust or degrade when exposed to water for months during construction? 💡In Concept Lab we are testing wood-plastic composite (WPC) deck boards as an alternative to metal and plywood splines! WPC decking is built to withstand the elements, making it an ideal candidate for splines that might be submerged or exposed to moisture for extended periods. This could address the common issue of splines needing replacement due to water damage, which more than doubles costs and adds significant hassle to construction projects. We've been evaluating WPC splines through single fastener shear tests and various inclined and vertically oriented shear tests for full scale splines. Initial results are promising compared to traditional plywood splines. Next up: cyclic testing to ensure long-term performance and reliability. We’re excited about the potential of WPC splines and would love to hear your thoughts or experiences with similar materials. Let’s innovate together to make construction more resilient and cost-effective! 🚀 #MassTimber #Engineering #Innovation #WoodPlasticComposite #ConstructionMaterials #SustainableDesign #StructuralEngineering #Testing

💡 To prepare for construction of the PNE Amphitheater, Kent Theobert Pretorius (Project engineer and Fast + Epp Computational Design Manager) asked Concept Lab to build a mock up of the warped CLT roof so we could test the installation of the SIGA Wetguard roof membrane with Kinsol Timber Systems, the CLT and roof installer. ✅ The mockup allowed us to test the membrane transitions across the roof valley, see the effects of the warped surface, and explore the important details around the steel roof anchors. This test helps us to understand the challenges that will be faced on site, and the mockup can be used to train the installation team. We look forward to reviewing the details later this month with EllisDon, Revery Architecture Inc., Nordic Structures, WaltersGroup and Kinsol Timber Systems! #PNE #mockup #testing #waterproofing #CLT #timberconstruction #structuraldesign

In our efforts to reuse test materials, we are continuing to mill CLT off cuts on our 6-axis CNC robotic arm. The outcome from the current design study is set of ‘sibling benches’ that will live in part at Concept Lab and part at DIALOG – a freeform sculptural timber installation that makes functional use of material that would otherwise be thrown away. Inspiration for the design by Dialog comes from the fluid geometries of heritage wooden boats, a vessel to propel the industry forward. The two sides come together to create a united free-flowing object, while individual modules can be pulled out as single seats. The amorphous shape lends itself to potential alternate creative uses such as display pedestals, side tables, and more. The success of sibling bench prototype is leading to many interesting ideas for furniture, stairs, sculptures, art, and other products that can be made from CLT cutoffs. We continue to develop the computational tools while also exploring the limitations of the robot arm. This will be fundamental in setting the ground rules for future projects and processes! To learn more, or to rent our robot arm for your own projects, reach out to conceptlab@fastepp.com. #reuse #CLT #upcycle #creativereuse #robotics #CNC #robotarm #ABB #masstimber #sculpture