Even before a building accepts its first occupant, it has racked up a steep carbon debt. Worldwide, the materials and construction required to erect buildings contributes 11% of global carbon emissions, according to the World Green Building Council.
Some places have begun experimenting with multistory timber buildings, and while they’ve recently reached new heights, timber buildings won’t be replacing skyscrapers anytime soon. But one Chilean startup thinks that there’s still room for wood to find a place.
“We’re more into hybrid buildings,” Andrés Mitnik, co-founder and CEO of Strong by Form, told TechCrunch. His company has developed a new engineered wood product that can replace concrete and steel in structural floors, allowing architects to design lighter, less carbon intensive buildings. The company is a Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist and is presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs this week in San Francisco.
The secret is in how those floor plates are made. “We think we can shape wood in a way that no one else has done it before,” he said.
Strong by Form has designed a structural floor piece that can span longer distances than existing engineered wood, making it a replacement for steel or concrete. At the same time, the product is lighter than all three.
On the outside, builders will see something familiar. “When a contractor gets it, they see a CLT [cross-laminated timber] slab,” Mitnik said. “All the connections, the construction system, all the processes on site are exactly as if you were using CLT, so no need to learn new things.”
But inside, instead of more solid wood, like you’d find in a CLT, the structure is filled with cavities. Wood shavings have been pressed into a wavy board that’s optimized to bear heavy loads.
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The wavy panel looks like oriented strand board, or OSB, which is common throughout job sites. But Strong by Form has developed software and a manufacturing technique to tweak the size and alignment of the wood flakes that are held together by a glue-like binder. “It’s sort of a next-generation OSB, if you want to think about it like that,” Mitnik said.
By using wood’s natural form and strengths, Strong by Form has built wood structural floors that currently span 10 meters (about 33 feet). Most CLT floors can only span half that distance.
All that technology isn’t free, but Mitnik said that the higher costs of its engineered wood product can be offset by its lighter weight.
“The idea is to create something that is so light it allows you to have an overall optimization of the structure,” he said. Lighter floors mean less steel and concrete in the frame, which lowers the overall cost of the building. “With those additional savings, we’re able to achieve price parity with concrete.”
Strong by Form is testing its 10-meter panel, ensuring it meets fire and load ratings that structural engineers require.
Next, it will raise a Series A round targeted at $10 million to build a pilot plant to produce the first pieces intended for commercial deployment.
In the meantime, Strong by Form has also developed a panel three millimeters thick that’s intended for finish instead of structural duty. The startup is working with train manufacturers to use its subtly undulating panel on the interior of trains, where they can soften the aesthetic of the walls and ceilings of train cars while reducing their mass.
“That has allowed us to fund all the R&D [research and development] required to do the floors, which is what we really want to scale, because that’s where the impact is,” Mitnik said.
If you want to learn more about Strong by Form from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of others, hearing their pitches, and listening to guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, this week in San Francisco. Learn more here.
