News & Events

The ARC Future Timber Hub is pleased to advise that from the week commencing 8 February to 12 February it will be showcasing its research and partners facilities through a series of lunchtime webinars being held at 12pm to 1:15pm AEST. Further details on each webinar presentation is listed on futuretimberhub.org. 

In 2020 the ARC Future Timber Hub (FTH) commissioned the Australian Institute for Business and Economics (AIBE), to undertake an analysis of the potential economic, environmental and social impacts of four of our current marquee ARC FTH research projects. AIBE engaged Tulipwood Economics to assist with the preparation of the report. The conclusion of this report emphasises the need for, and opportunities in, continuing engineered timber focused, industry relevant research projects that specifically target resolution of performance gaps and development of commercially viable, safe and sustainable timber-based solutions.

The ARC Future Timber Hub is very proud of Harry Mills, ARC Future Timber Hub PhD student at The University of Queensland, who's Gottstein project: "Underutilised Timber (UUT) Acceptance through North America and Europe" has featured as cover story of the Timber & Forestry Enews, issue 634.
In 2019 Harry was awarded the Gottsten Fellowship. The fellowship enabled Harry to travel to leading areas of timber manufacturing and design in the Northern Hemisphere, where he was able to meet with professionals from forestry and manufacturing, design, research and education. The grant was used on Harry's project 'The Potential for Underutilised Timber in the Built Environment' and enabled him to investigate and bring back new ideas, learnings and insights which he developed into this report. 

The Queensland Government Department of Agriculture & Fisheries (DAF) scientists working with the Future Timber Hub, at the DAF Salisbury Research Facility, are highlighted in the article "New mass-panel product research aims to optimise connection design, performance" on page 8 of the latest edition of Timber & Forestry Enews, Issue 633. DAF scientists are currently involved in three areas of research within the Future Timber Hub – optimising wood-based, mass-panels for Australian building systems; the impact of continuous drying on engineered wood; and the structural behaviour of reinforced timber composite products.

See Hub Projects:

1. The optimisation of wood-based mass-panels for Australian building systems
2. Impact of continuous drying on key production and performance criteria of engineered wood structural elements
3. Non-destructive evaluation of elastic material properties and acoustic characterisation of wood based massive panels

The winners of Australia’s peak international design awards – the highest honour for design and innovation in the country were announced on the 9 September 2020 during the 2020 Good Design Week. 

The Suspended Remnants - Timber Pavilion, which is a structure created from a collaboration between two ARC Future Timber Hub Projects, Alternative uses for under-valued sawmill products in innovative timber structures and Prefabrication and digital fabrication strategies for large-scale timber construction, received a prestigious Good Design Award Gold Accolade in the Engineering Design category in recognition for outstanding design and innovation.

The latest large-scale CLT compartment fire test for the Future Timber Hub Project “Exploring the self-extinguishment mechanism of engineered timber in full-scale compartment fires” has been showcased on the ARC Research Highlights.  There will be more large-scale compartment fire tests later this year!

On the 22 June 2020 a group of delegates from the ARC Future Timber Hub, which included delegates from The University of Queensland, Griffith University, Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) and Hyne Timber were showcased the timber construction of the Monterey Apartments building site at Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, Australia.  Simon Betteridge and members of the team at the Gardner Vaughan Group hosted the tour which highlighted the key drives and learnings for this market leading project.