The International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction
Publications / CCC 2025 - Zadar, Croatia
SMALL RESIDENTIAL UNIT MADE OF PAPER-BASED PRODUCTS - RESEARCH AND DESIGN
Growing market of construction industry as well as limitations in access to basic building materials such as timber, steel, and cement force engineers to use alternative building materials. At the same time because of natural disasters and wars there is a need of building mobile, non-expensive, easy and quick to assemble emergency shelters. The answer for the above mentioned issues may be paper-based products which seem to be promising building material. In this paper research on the potential use of paper-based products, namely paper tubes to create a small residential unit has been presented. For this purpose mechanical parameters of paper tubes were tested. Compressive, tensile, and flexural strengths were determined. Because of non-isotropic character of material and scale effect similar to what can be observed in the case of timber structures, mechanical tests were conducted both on small specimens and on full-scale elements. Based on test results and architectural layout structural design has been done. In calculations basic assumptions, static scheme, dead and live loads, loads combinations, internal forces and dimensioning have been included. Finally, considering aspect of low-costs, sustainability, easiness in assembly and mobility design of small residential unit has been created.