Full-scale (industrial) wood floor using welded-through dowels

Abstract

High-speed dowel rotation welding was used to fabricate a full-scale suspended floor, an applicable civil-engineering structure, to demonstrate that scaling up of such welding technique was feasible. This was coupled with obtaining a more light-weight floor assembly with equal stiffness by maximizing the rigidity of the suspended floor while minimizing the number of timber planks used to build it, and maintaining its vibration frequency high and its level of vibration low. Several assembly and connection combinations of two and three slats linked through welded wood dowels were tried to determine the mechanical resistance of the cross-over joints that had to be used in the building of the floor. Deformation under 4-point static load of the floor was carried out to determine displacement under load and the floor vibration behaviour was determined by the use of accelerometers. The fundamental first natural frequency measured does satisfy well the requirements specified by Eurocode 5.

Adhesiveless bonding of wood – A review with a focus on wood welding

“…When the maximum rotational rate value was decreased, the suspended floor made using the resulting dowel-welded planks were better performing than traditional floors (Pizzi et al 2006;Pizzi 2007). In fact, this made it possible to obtain a high degree of rigidity of the suspended floor with a minimal number of timber planks needed to build it (Bocquet et al 2006). Combining dowel welding with shrink-fitting using mortise and tenon wood joints has shown better joint strength than individual techniques alone (Mougel et al 2011).…”

Wood products and green chemistry

“…The welding technology has been used to make furniture of different types (Segovia and Pizzi 2009;Segovia et al 2010), to build structures both interior and exterior (Bocquet et al 2006(Bocquet et al , 2007O'Loising et al 2012), and to obtain waterproof joints (Mansouri et al 2011b;Omrani et al 2009c;Pizzi et al 2011;Pizzi et al 2013b) as well as butt joints of very dense wood (Mansouri et al 2010;Omrani et al 2009a) of mechanical resistance comparable to that of glued finger joints.…”

Wood blockboards for construction fabricated by wood welding with pre-oiled dowels

“…Wood species, relative diameter difference between the dowel and the receiving hole and press time were shown to be the parameters yielding significant strength differences [1][2][3][4]6]. The structural applicability of wood welding in scaling-up the technique to manufacture a large-scale structural element, such as a suspended wood floor assembly [7], or beams joined by welded dowels [8] has already been demonstrated.…”