Safe and Long-lasting Buildings with Stora Enso

Stora Enso Wood products provide wood-based innovations and solutions for everyday living and housing needs. Its product range covers all areas of urban construction, from supporting structures to interior design and environmental construction. Our products include massive wood elements and housing modules, wood components and pellets. A variety of sawn timber goods complete the selection.

Stora Enso Wood Products has established a Healthy and Affordable Living Lab which is a place to create and test different (digital) solutions that will change the current way of building and living by taking a more customer-driven approach. We look for new ideas to make future buildings and living healthier, safer and more affordable.

Opportunity Overview

Buildings should be made to last long. Investors, no matter if private or public, want their buildings to bring good value for their money even after decades. They would like to know in beforehand, if e.g. a moisture problem might turn into a serious problem. This would save them money. Any moisture, structural or other problem will shorten the life of a building.

Sensors, that could be embedded to wooden building elements already at the mill, could measure different types of information from wood and this information could be collected, stored and analyzed, so that problems could be predicted before they get too serious (and expensive).

We are looking for ideas for the measuring device (sensor itself) that could be embedded to our elements, as well as the methods, how those devices could measure different key properties of wood.

Examples we're looking for

Moisture of wood

Timber works great as structural material, as long as it be will kept dry. The problem is that surface moisture content does not tell how dry/wet the wood is in the middle of the element. In ideal case we could follow up the moisture content inside of wood during the whole delivery process.

We are looking for moisture sensor solutions which could be embedded into wooden elements already at our factory.

We are keen to find sensors that have many functionalities.

Safety of structures

Buildings need to be safe even after decades of hard use. Structures are designed for much more stressing conditions which buildings will normally face but we want to digitally measure and ensure safety. If any problems should occur, we would like the occupants to be alarmed before anything serious happens.

There are many things affecting to structural safety. I.e. moisture, strength, warps, cracks etc.

Do you have new technology for ensuring safety of structures in (timber) buildings?

Natural durability

Thousands of timber buildings have last hundreds of years in demanding conditions. Those buildings were designed and maintained well.

Exposure to changing weather conditions affect the lifecycle of wooden façade, resulting in surface cracks, molds, change of color, deformations etc. These problems could be predicted by utilizing digital solutions and informing building owners or occupants, when they should act.

Do you have ideas and solutions how we can improve durability of wooden facades?

Part of the global bioeconomy, Stora Enso is a leading provider of renewable products in packaging, biomaterials, and wooden construction and one of the largest private forest owners in the world. We believe that everything that is made from fossil-based materials today can be made from a tree tomorrow.

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