Tall hybrid RC framed buildings with massive timber floor plates

This paper discusses feasibility of using massive but lightweight Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) plates as floor and roof components of tall buildings constructed with reinforced concrete (RC) as the main skeleton. A case study using a 24-storey building designed with CLT floors is presented here along with a matched design of a building having traditional RC floors. Result indicate that structural benefits from substituting lightweight timber slabs for the traditional relatively heavy slabs are significant yielding potentially large savings in both the main structural skeleton and foundation systems. For example, lateral drift during a design level earthquake is predicted to be reduced by about 15 to 20 percent using mechanically equivalent CLT floor slabs in lieu of RC slabs typical of 'normal' construction.