Technology Roadmap: Lumber and Value-Added Wood Products
7.0 Engineered Wood Products — Existing and Future Technology

Introduction and Overview

Engineered wood products (EWP) are not a new concept. The rearrangement of wood with the assistance of an adhesive has been with us for over a century as an industrial, proven concept — plywood. Laminated beams were first assembled with nails, then with adhesives. Trusses, originally assembled with nails, experienced phenomenal growth, starting half a century ago with the assistance of steel plates. While original engineered wood products were initially designed to replace traditional wood products (panel products for planks, laminated beams for large sections), engineers soon realised that they could make use of their new-found flexibility to design systems making better use of available resources while providing products better suited to market demand.

This section will focus on non-panel engineered wood products, made mostly from small sections of high-performance wood, and assembled according to recognised engineering principles to provide the most efficient match between the forest resource and specific needs of the building industry for high-performance structural products. The products described include machine stress-rated (MSR) lumber, finger-jointed lumber, glued-laminated ("glulam") lumber, wood I-beams and metal-plated trusses. Composite panel products will not be discussed in this report, as they were covered in detail in a separate Roadmap. This report will also exclude engineered products such as Parallam^* and Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL)^* , which are proprietary products manufactured from wood strands, and laminated-veneer lumber (LVL), which is manufactured from veneer.

^* Trademark names for Trust Joist