Dear participants,

the Sustainable Building Design Lab of University of Liège is a research laboratory focused on design of high performance buildings, development and evaluation of sustainable solutions for the construction sector.

As part of European COST Action CA20139 - Holistic design of taller timber buildings (for more information visit https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA20139/), the following survey aims to help to reply to subgroup "Durability and Service Life Prediction" questions: "What steps are required to give a high-rise timber building a life of 150 years? And how to predict the service-life in a planning process?"

The total duration of the survey is estimated to less than 10 minutes.

We thank you in advance for your partecipation.

 SDB Lab members

 

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Although life cycle approach is consolidated in building industry, there is still not a well-defined method to address the lifetime of building components.

The design working life is defined in EUROCODE 0 (EN 1990) as "assumed period for which a structure or part of it is to be used for its intended purpose with anticipated maintenance but without major repair being necessary" and it is equal to 50 years for building structures. However, experience has shown us that the actual life service can be very different from the design life.

There are many available databases regarding expected service life for traditional building components (see picture below), but there are yet not such information for recent tall timber buildings.

The objective of the following survey is thus to define the actual service life for medium-raise (3 to 8 storeys) and tall (above 8 storeys) timber building components based on the experience and knowledge of timber building industry professionals.

An example of such a building is Treet (see picture below), a 14-story hybrid combination of glulam framework and CLT balconies and staircase, constructed in Norway in 2015. 

Despite each component possibly being made of different timber materials (e.g. a slab panel could be made of cross laminated timber or laminated veneer lumber...), this survey is not intended to differentiate between these materials. We will use a probabilistic approach to determine an average value.

We therefore invite you to partecipate in this survey to provide information for each building component with an estimation of their lifespan range in years (i.e. minimum to maximum), according to your knowledge and experience.

For those components you do not have information, please leave the fields blank.

Foundations

(reinforced concrete, others...)

Timber columns and beams

(glue laminated timber, laminated veneer lumber, others...)

Wall, floor and roof SOLID timber panels

(cross laminated timber, dowel laminated timber, laminated veneer lumber, others...)

Wall, floor and roof FRAME timber panels

(hollow boxes, ribs, light weight timber, solid lumber, others...)

Wall, floor and roof insulations

(mineral wool, wood wool, fiberglass, others...)

Fire protection layer

Waterproofing and vapor barrier layers

Plasterboard

Wall wooden external cladding

Wooden cladding coating

(Oils, paints, film-forming coatings, others...)

Other wall external cladding

(Metal, polymeric, cement-composite, others...)

Flat roof cladding

(Bitumen membranes, polymeric membranes, others...)

Internal wall finishings

Internal floor finishings

Glazed elements

Please feel free to share in the spaces below any comments, recommendations or documents that might be relevant to the purpose of this survey.