It creates a warm and comfortable ambience and meets the current desire for a better life quality and a more eco-friendly way of life: wood is more and more requested for constructions in private or industrial sectors and public institutions.
WHAT IS LAMINATED WOOD:
Laminated wood (or Glulam) is a structural material, made of glued wood panels.
Laminated wood has all the virtues of natural wood, without major flaws: it is possible to create elements of any size and shape, without the limits imposed by the size of tree trunks.
LAMINATED WOOD: PROS
Given the same payload, Laminated wood is lighter than steel (about -33%). Its lightness, combined with good mechanical strength, allows the construction of aesthetically slim and elegant components , even more than 100 meters long (the beams derived from natural trunks are rarely more than 25\30 meters long): therefore architects have a greater artistic freedom during the design phase.
In event of fire, a timber structure is safer than steel or concrete: a carbonized layer formed around the core slows the combustion and gives this material a higher resistance to fire (REI 30-90).
Due to its high resistance to chemicals, this type of wood is increasingly used in the construction of commercial and industrial buildings.
Glulam ensures also a great resistance to weathering, so it can be employed in constructing structures and bridges.
TECHNOLOGY
Laminated wood is still wood and it keeps all its qualities, but it is also an industrial product that overcomes the flaws of solid wood through a technological process.
Since December 1, 2012 it is required to mark the Glulam products in accordance with the European standard EN 14080. This standard sets the requirements for glued laminated timber used for load-bearing structures and provides the procedures for conformity assessment and the CE marking.
The glued laminated wood manufacturing process is a set of operations performed in appropriate plants, which essentially consist in the classification of unitary elements that compose wood, and in their recomposition (through gluing) in order to create elements of any shape and size.
The UNI EN 14080 certification also includes a periodic inspection of the production process, of the finger joints implementation and of the bond strength, through destructive tests performed on samples collected during the production process.