Edinburgh Napier University

  The UK has the renewable natural resource, internationally recognised expertise, and technical capabilities necessary to be at the forefront of a new approach to delivering a sustainable and resilient built environment in response to the COVID-19 recovery (build back better), the declared climate emergency, and UN Sustainable Development Goals. Managed responsibly, the renewable natural capital of the UK can underpin its prosperity and create a built environment which has a positive influence on the health and wellbeing of its occupants. This demonstration project represents the first phase of an iterative journey to market commercialisation for homegrown engineered timber products and a subsequent 'SNRG' courtyard proposal. The core outputs are to design, engineer, manufacture, construct and evaluate the engineered homegrown timber elements of an individual, two storey home that directly replicates modules that will make up a completed courtyard development.

The project will harness well-established international developments in building construction technology, and align them with societal and financial shifts in UK housing design, together with the move towards offsite manufacture of buildings (demonstrated by the UK Government's 2017 presumption in favour of offsite), specifically focussing on housing. The UK has experienced a wide-spread market shift in the appetite for mass timber production, with no manufacturing facilities currently in existence, aside from the prototyping equipment at CSIC. Therefore, with increasing demand for the product based on benefits such as its overall life-cycle costs, reduced wastage, increased construction and delivery speed, health and wellbeing improvements and building fabric performance, there is an immediate requirement to investigate an optimal mass timber solution from a UK context.The project objective is to evidence homegrown engineered timber products for the UK market from a mechanical, engineering, productivity, and cost perspective. To rigorously interrogate the potential solution, the proposed project will be fully digitised via the creation of a digital twin which will capture all available information, as well as test project suitability with the supply chain and give consideration to Design for Manufacture and Assemble (DfMA) and Disassembly (DfMA+D) requirements. This will ensure mass customisation and standardisation, enable full process automation, and take cognisance of the need to design and construct for circularity and the paradigm of the Circular Economy. In the current COVID-19 climate, factory shift patterns can better manage social distancing, automation can reduce manual handling and personalisation can ensure continuous value add to our renewable natural resources.