LIFE LUGO + BIODINÁMICO RECEIVES THE AWARD AT THE WORLD CONGRESS OF WOOD ENGINEERING
Researchers at the Structural Wood Engineering Platform (PEMADE) of the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela receive an award at the World Wood Engineering Congress (WCTE 2018, Seoul, Republic of Korea) for the development, design and construction of the gridshell of the Campus de Lugo. It is a prize awarded at the most important conference on wood engineering in the world, held every two years, where engineers, architects and wood specialists from all continents come together.
This structure has been developed within the LIFE Lugo + Biodinámico project coordinated by the City Council of Lugo, in which the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid participate. The project is financed by the European Union through the LIFE program and the Lugo Provincial Council.
The PEMADE gridhsell is composed of elastically curved lattice wood sheets. These sheets are constructed from straight and identical pieces of sawed wood. This technique makes it possible to create doubly curved structures of large dimensions by crossing the sheets in successive layers, as if it were a fabric. The work has been developed by engineers and architects from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The team formed by Antonio José Lara Bocanegra, Antonio Roig, Almudena Majano Majano and Manuel Guaita presented a new cover of elastic gridshell type, the first made in Spain and the first in the world that uses as material Eucalyptus globulus wood.
This first gridshell prototype is used as a warehouse for PEMADE wood. Its structure is 24m. of length that rests only on its short sides saving a light of 15m. and 4.5m. of flight at each end. The use of Eucalyptus globulus wood is given by its suitability and resistant properties without practically presenting knots. It is the forest species classified in Europe for structural use with greater resistant properties. This work provides several novelties in the field of wood gridshell such as a structural concept of long cover supported on only one of its short sides and the use of a third direction of bent sheets to provide shear stiffness in the plane of the cover.
