Developing dowel-laminated timber panels from short salvaged timber elements

Reusing salvaged timber in structural applications could offer a sustaina-ble solution towards a circular economy in the construction sector. How-ever, this is associated with some challenges such as length limitation, which would require further processing and end-to-end joining. The aim of this research was to develop a new approach using short, salvaged tim-ber elements which can be used in the fabrication of dowel-laminated timber (DLT) panels without requiring significant processing or end-to-end jointing or gluing. In the developed approach, the salvaged timber elements were used in combination with new timber boards, which were all connected together using salvaged plywood tenons. The salvaged tim-ber layers were prestressed in the system. This way, they could contribute to the bending performance of the DLT panels by resisting compression stress. The effectiveness of the new approach was evaluated on several small-scale and large-scale DLT panels. For the small-scale DLT panels, the bending stiffness before and after prestressing was evaluated. For the large-scale DLT panels, the first eigenfrequency, damping ratio, bending properties, and failure modes were evaluated. Analysing the results, it was concluded that the proposed approach can lead to a substantial improve-ment in the bending stiffness of the DLT panels without requiring end-to-end joining or gluing. On average, 40 % increase in the bending stiffness was achieved in the DLT panels after the prestressing. Therefore, the pre-sented approach can be a suitable solution for reusing short, salvaged timber elements in DLT panels. This can further reduce the need for raw material and improve the sustainability aspects of DLT panels.