Unipanel: Stability of the Form

Engineering lumber or structural material that was manufactured on the basis of wood and resin is getting more frequent in timber engineering. The Unipanel is a new technology in this area. It is also known as core scaleboard (CSB ) that in its turn belongs to laminated wood constructions (LWC) and is sandwich material. Light, eco-friendly, easy to manufacture and to use, short of the flaws most wood materials have, it can be used in construction as well as in manufacturing of doors, furniture, interior items, etc. Sergey Ovchinnikov who invented the new material dwells on the Unipanel.

Sergey, what properties does Unipanel have, and what are its advantages compared to other wood materials?

The Unipanel is wood material that belongs to engineering wood; in other words, this material has predictable properties. When working with wood one usually has to deal with the serious issue of anisotropy, i.e. inequality of its properties in different directions. Depending on the weather conditions, wood is absolutely different through the length and breadth of its fibers. This causes significant differences in its deformation as far as temperature and humidity are concerned. They might be 100 or many more times different.

Therefore, when working with wood it is important that the person is skillful, that one intuitively knows what to do so that the wood preserves the desired shape or position. This is what mahogany workers are good at. We in our turn are aiming at making wood material with a maximum share of wood and a minimum share of glue (less than 2%) for technical production and industrialized construction. Thus the main challenge we had to deal with was to make sure that in the wood there was no deformation that could be caused by the temperature and humidity

How did you manage to do it?

The layers of panel scale board along wood fibers are divided into separate small elements cut by blind slots that overlap along the depth of the panel. The minimum width of the cuts ensures that they act as a dilatation (contraction) joint. As a result, one gets a construction made of reinstated wood with layers that consist of fractional bar elements (BE). They are cut according to the physical, mechanical and rheological properties of the wood and glue as well as the production technology and operating conditions. Thus, by choosing the optimal size of the gluing area of 2 BEs it is possible to guarantee a sustainable life-cycle of the material (even under harsh operational conditions.

It is reasonable to call the design suggested the core scaleboard (CSB), as it has actually been patented. The logic behind it is very simple: when cross-glued two layers of BE wood laths form a planar frame. Two or more frames glued along their depth form a construction. One can have as many layers as one wants (according to the objectives the designer has) as well as the slope of the bar elements within the layer and the adjacent layers. The same thing concerns BE gaps.

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Interviewed by Olga Rostova