To design an outstanding wooden building, the material characteristics need to be considered at every step of the project. Therefore, designing efficient solutions with massive wood elements like CLT and LVL requires detailed calculations that take into consideration the specific properties of wood.
Engineers working with wood elements often solve this problem by using a range of spreadsheets for calculations and structural analysis, but the team at Stora Enso wanted to find a better way to support wood design and developed CLT Engineer, a timber engineering software that was renamed a year later when LVL elements were added, and became known as Calculatis. The tool is now available in six languages and has users all across the globe.
Thomas Demschner, R&D Manager, Structural Engineering, and the creator of Calculatis, explains how the development of the software started: “CLT as a building material has a load bearing behaviour that is rather complex to analyse – what was needed was a software to help engineers. We wanted to develop something that’s always up to date and rather universal, so we decided to offer a browser-based tool that can be used on any device.”
Detailed calculations for efficient design
With Calculatis, designers are better able to find the most efficient solutions for their input and export illustrative reports to be shared internally and with external engineers and contractors. In addition, the software makes structural calculations more straightforward. Modules for a wide range of elements allow for faster calculations and a smoother workflow with all the results in one place.
Reinhard Aigner, Technical Director at DMH in Austria, uses Calculatis daily and has been using the tool and sharing feedback with the development team since the beta version was first released. “We use Calculatis from the bidding phase all the way to detail planning,” Aigner says, explaining that Calculatis results are used internally in sketches and execution plans and sometimes shared with structural engineers and carpenters.
At the core of Calculatis are the ready-to-use modules that were designed to enable fast calculations for specific elements. “We use Calculatis module by module, depending on needs. My favourite and most used modules are the CLT floor panel, CLT column, CLT wall and cantilever floor/roof modules,” Reinhard Aigner says. Calculatis initially offered CLT modules, glulam and solid timber and has since then been expanded to include LVL.
