Photo courtesy of New Energy Works
Photo courtesy of New Energy Works
Photo courtesy of New Energy Works
New Energy Works Manufacturing Building
New Energy Works, a design-build timber-frame company based in New York and Oregon needed a new manufacturing building in McMinnville, Oregon, to house a new Oikos X CNC machine imported from Europe. Eclipse Engineering (now Cushing Terrell), a longtime partner with New Energy Works, was brought on to provide structural engineering services in collaboration with the client’s in-house architecture team.
New Energy Works places sustainability at the forefront of all their work, so the goal of this project was to minimize the use of steel and concrete. Adding complexity to the design was their desire to create a 90-foot-long space with 30-foot eave walls, with no intermediate columns — features traditionally achievable through the use of steel or concrete.
The biggest challenge of this project was designing an all-wood, 90-foot span truss. The team generated more than 10 truss options with varying roof pitches, geometries, and materials; but the final design was inspired by photos of European manufacturing facilities — a low, double-pitch, sandwich glulam truss with double top and bottom chords and single webs. The connections appeared as having been made using through bolts without steel plates.
Many iterations of truss designs were created before arriving at a final design solution.
The completed trusses more closely resemble a steel open web bar joist versus a traditional timber truss. The concern was that every connection was eccentric, a feature avoided in most code as it can lead to truss failure. The engineering team spent many hours modeling, running calculations for large bolt groups, and designing reinforcing screws to resist radial tension in the wood fibers.
The final design unavoidably required a single web — the last one — made of steel. Otherwise, these trusses are fully wood with one-inch diameter through bolts and a plethora of fully threaded screws.
LOCATION
McMinnville, OR