EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Probabilistic Assessment of Engineered Timber Reusability after Moisture Exposure

Yiping Meng, Chulin Jiang, Courtney Jayne Scurr, Farzad Pour Rahimian and David Hughes

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Engineered timber is pivotal to low-carbon construction, but moisture uptake during its service life can compromise structural reliability and impede reuse within a circular economy model. Despite growing interest, quantitative standards for classifying the reusability of moisture-exposed timber are still lacking. This study develops a probabilistic framework to determine the post-exposure reusability of engineered timber. Laminated specimens were soaked to full saturation, dried to 25% moisture content, and subjected to destructive three-point flexural testing. Structural integrity was quantified by a residual-performance metric that assigns 80% weight to the retained flexural modulus and 20% to the retained maximum load, benchmarked against unexposed controls. A hierarchical Bayesian multinomial logistic model with horseshoe priors, calibrated through Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo sampling, jointly infers the decision threshold separating three Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) reuse levels and predicts those levels from five field-measurable features: density, moisture content, specimen size, grain orientation, and surface hardness. Results indicate that a single wet-dry cycle preserves 70% of specimens above the 0.90 residual-performance threshold (Level 1), whereas repeated cycling lowers the mean residual to 0.78 and reallocates many specimens to Levels 2-3. The proposed framework yields quantified decision boundaries and a streamlined on-site testing protocol, providing a foundation for robust quality assurance standards.

Date: 2025-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11061 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2506.11061

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().

 
Page updated 2025-06-16
Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2506.11061