Fibrx Rocking Chair: Design and Application of Tailored Timber as an Embedded Frame for Natural Fibre-Reinforced Polymer (NFRP) Coreless Winding

Abstract

The building industry needs to innovate towards a more sustainable future and can do so through a combination of more renewable material choices and less wasteful fabrication processes. To address these issues, a hybrid material and fabrication system was developed using laminated timber veneer and natural fibre-reinforced composites (NFRPs), two materials that are leveraged for their potential of strategic material placement in additive processes towards programmed material behaviour and performance. The main contribution is in the hybrid fabrication approach, using thin, bent laminated veneer as an embedded frame for coreless filament winding of NFRP, which removes the need for temporary, wasteful formwork that is typically required to achieve structurally performative bent timber or FRP elements. Integrative methods are developed for the design, simulation, and fabrication of a rocking chair prototype that illustrates the architectural potential of the developed fabrication approach.

Keywords

• natural fibre-reinforced polymers
• NFRP
• coreless filament winding
• CFW
• hybrid material system
• computational design