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arXiv · 2506.11061

Probabilistic Assessment of Engineered Timber Reusability after Moisture Exposure

Yiping Meng·Chulin Jiang·Courtney Jayne Scurr·Farzad Pour Rahimian·David Hughes
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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.

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Yiping Meng, Chulin Jiang, Courtney Jayne Scurr, Farzad Pour Rahimian, David Hughes. 2025-05-29. Probabilistic Assessment of Engineered Timber Reusability after Moisture Exposure. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11061

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