On February 1st, 2023, the Kick-off Meeting for the research project “Timber Use and Maintain – TU&M”, started on January 1st the same year, was held at the Wood Research Institute in Munich. The project aims to develop circular timber frame elements considering their technical, environmental and economic feasibility. On building level, the potentials of a circular design as a contribution to adaptive and flexible timber buildings will be analyzed. The technical development of the timber frame elements will be conducted on two levels: The elements will be designed to enable an easy disassembly and their re-use as well as to allow the separation of the (wood-based) materials at the end-of-life. On material level, the cascading potential of the materials and their potential (re-)use in the timber frame elements will be determined. The technical development is accompanied by studies on the environmental and economic performance of the elements as well as the development of digital documentation solutions.
The project emerged from the TUM.wood network (holz.tum.de) at the Technical University of Munich and includes the professorships on Wood Science, Timber Structures and Building Construction, Architecture and Timber Construction, Architectural Informatics and Circular Economy. The industry partners are Haas Fertigbau and Brüninghoff Holz. The project is funded for 36 months by the German BMEL (funding codes 2221HVO37A-E).