Doctoral students presented their research at international wood symposium
Optical scanning of timber to estimate the ring width and pith location and make better use of sawn timber. X-ray as a useful tool for examining differences in density between trees of different species and ages. These were results presented by three doctoral students in building technology and forest and wood technology at a wood symposium in Germany.
Last week in September 2019, three doctoral students from the Faculty of technology at Linnaeus University attended the 21st International Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation of Wood Symposium, hosted in Freiburg, Germany. Two of the students, Andreas Briggert and Tadios Habite, are from the Department of building technology, and the third, Grace Jones, from the Department of forestry and wood technology. All three had separate presentations during the symposium.
Utilise sawn timber better
Andreas Briggert presented results from a grading project carried out in collaboration with both Swedish and international wood companies. The title of the conference paper is Predicting tensile strength in sawn timber using in-plane fibre directions and dynamic modulus of elasticity. Andreas’s research shows that a better material utilisation of sawn timber can be achieved by using data obtained from optical scanning.
Estimate ring width and pith location
Tadios Habite introduced a conference paper titled Detection of pith location in Norway spruce timber on the basis of optical scanning of longitudinal surfaces. He has been working with data from optical scanners and looking at changes in light intensity from scanning timber boards, to estimate the ring width and predict the pith location. This work has had good results for estimating both ring width and pith location within boards of Norway spruce. Tadios’s research is part of the industrial graduate school ProWood+.
Measure density by X-ray machine
Grace Jones has been working with Skogforsk silver and downy birch families near Nybro in south-east Sweden, and looking at differences between the species at the same site and age. Her conference paper is titled Nondestructive wood density testing in birch (Betula pendula and B. pubescens) genetic field trials in southern Sweden. This paper is a subsample of a larger dataset from her 2018 field work, and compares infield density estimates to density measured by an X-ray machine. She has found a good relationship between the two methods, and that silver birch was generally denser. Her work is part of the FRAS research group, for the future of forestry in south Sweden. Grace’s costs for attending were covered by the Werner von Seydlitz foundation.
International interest
The Symposium was hosted by the Forest Research Institute Baden-Württemberg and was for those involved in non-destructive testing and evaluation of wood, wood-based products and structures. It had a lot of international interest and was co-sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), the Forest Products Society (FPS) and the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO).