GluLamb

This software has come out of the PhD project Integrated material practice in free-form timber structures as part of the InnoChain network, based at CITA and supported by industrial partners White arkitekter AB and Blumer Lehmann AG. It is written and maintained by Tom Svilans.

Current features

Features include:

• Creating straight, single-curved, and double-curved glulams with specific cross-section dimensions.
• Different options for orienting the cross-section - a single vector, multiple vectors, a rail curve, a surface, etc.
• Tools for analyzing the amount of bending in a glulam.
• Tools for analyzing the wood fibre direction with respect to the surface geometry of a beam element.
• Tools for extracting specifications from the glulam model such as sizing and count of lamellae, volume, etc.
• Tools for extracting specific features from the glulam: surfaces that follow the cross-section orientation, edges, cross-sections planes at specific points along the glulam, etc.

Requirements

GluLamb is built for Rhino 6 (RhinoCommon v6.22.20028.13281) and will not work with previous versions of Rhino.

Known issues

This is an initial release. As such, some features might not work completely as expected while some bugs are ironed out. Please use the issue tracker to submit bug reports.

Future features

As more features are ported over from existing research code, this toolkit will expand to also include:

• A Workpiece model for combining the glulam blank model with design geometry and associated driving geometry for fabrication.
• Tools for finding possible intersections and joint locations in glulam assemblies.
• Tools for generating parametric joints based on the type of intersection between glulam elements.
• More tools for precisely specifying the cross-sectional composition of the glulam, including wood species of specific lamellae.
• Tools for interfacing with centreline-based CAE for glulam structures.
• Tools for discretizing heterogeneous materials for interfacing with FEA for individual glulams or joints.