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Structural Design from Reclaimed Material Sauvabelin – The Never-Ending Story

Benoît Pascal Kälin
2022
Student project
Abstract

This thesis is developed as part of the final year project that must be completed to obtain the MCs degree in Civil Engineering at EPFL. It follows up the pre-study project carried out during the last semester of the course. The environmental crisis that our society is currently facing is no longer a surprise to anyone. While a shift of mindsets can slowly be observed in many fields of activity, the construction sector remains one of the most energy-intensive sectors that consumes enormous quantities of materials resulting in an important amount of waste and relative emissions. The shift of paradigm from an oil-based economy toward a material economy will progressively enforce the daily use of reclaimed materials within our infrastructures. Designing from reclaimed materials, however, reverse the usual design process and not only requires new tools but also requires new regulations. The project is developed around the concept of reuse and aims to assess the potential to reuse in the timber construction domain. The first part of this report is dedicated to the assessment of the potential and limitations of such strategy while the second part is centred around the development of a fictitious case study. The case study aims to propose a feasible design for the new lookout tower of Sauvabelin considering that its load bearing structure could be built from reclaimed elements of the existing tower. The project is intended to be used as a banner to reuse by demonstrating the early-stage feasibility and benefit of implementing a reuse strategy. It is further hoped that the project can be used as a discussion tool to initiate reflection on the future of the Sauvabelin Tower. The project therefore brings together structural, architectural, and environmental considerations that need to be balanced out to obtain a sustainable design. The project involves the use of the decision support tool Phoenix 3D, developed at the Structural Xploration Lab in Fribourg, which provides the assignment of an available stock and new elements to member positions of truss structures. A parametric design of the load bearing system is implemented in the Rhinoceros 3D – Grasshopper environment to be able to perform some optimization regarding its environmental impact and other quantities assessed through Phoenix 3D. The project proves the feasibility of the pursued strategy and show that a load bearing structure with similar height can be constructed only from the reclaimed elements of the current Sauvabelin Tower. It was, furthermore, assessed that the environmental impact of the load bearing structure can theoretically be reduced of about 45% in implementing a reuse strategy. The retained design and final look of the tower are finally presented in the last part of this report.

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Bearing (mechanical)
A bearing is a machine element that constrains relative motion to only the desired motion and reduces friction between moving parts. The design of the bearing may, for example, provide for free linear movement of the moving part or for free rotation around a fixed axis; or, it may prevent a motion by controlling the vectors of normal forces that bear on the moving parts. Most bearings facilitate the desired motion by minimizing friction.
Rolling-element bearing
In mechanical engineering, a rolling-element bearing, also known as a rolling bearing, is a bearing which carries a load by placing rolling elements (such as balls or rollers) between two concentric, grooved rings called races. The relative motion of the races causes the rolling elements to roll with very little rolling resistance and with little sliding. One of the earliest and best-known rolling-element bearings are sets of logs laid on the ground with a large stone block on top.
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