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Wood processing often involves an array of products and coproducts and a cascade of primary and secondary uses. Prior life-cycle assessment (LCA) reporting allocated environmental burdens to products and coproducts based on mass for multiproduct systems to develop environmental product declarations, which are developed from LCAs following the procedures detailed in product category rules (PCRs). A recent PCR for North American structural and architectural wood products requires allocation by economic value when the main products exceed the value of coproducts by greater than 10 percent....

Combustion performance for three types of wood–aluminum composites was investigated using cone calorimetry tests. The results revealed that time to ignition of the specimens was increased and more than 100 times after the lamination of 1.6-mm-thick aluminum alloy sheet on the surface (from 17 to 1990 s). And residual mass of the wood–aluminum composites was improved and almost quadrupled (from 21.795% to 81.664%). The peak heat release rate, average heat release rate, total heat release, and mean mass loss rate of wood–aluminum composites with 1.6-mm-thick aluminum alloy sheet on the...

The Forest Products Annual Market Review 2016-2017 provides a comprehensive analysis of markets in the UNECE region and reports on the main market influences outside the UNECE region. It covers the range of products from the forest to the end-user: from roundwood and primary processed products to value-added and housing. Statistics-based chapters analyse the markets for wood raw materials, sawn softwood, sawn hardwood, wood-based panels, paper, paperboard and woodpulp. Other chapters analyse policies, forest products trade barriers affecting the UNECE region, and markets for wood energy....

Conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to various renewable fuels, chemicals, materials, and electricity has attracted more and more interest in recent decades to decrease the dependence on fossil resources and reduce net CO2 emissions. Herein, we have developed an integrated process of biomass pretreatment for enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose coupled with electricity generation with polyoxometalates (POMs) and ferric ion as electron mediators and proton carriers. The pretreatment is a “charging” process, and the re-oxidation of the POMs is effectively a “discharging” process. The pretreate...

Conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to electricity using fuel cell technologies is a promising but challenging research topic for sustainable electricity production. This is because that lignocellulosic biomass generally cannot be directly used as a fuel for electricity generation in a conventional fuel cell with high efficiency. Typical fuel cells that can convert lignocellulosic biomass to electricity under mild conditions ( < 100 °C) include microbial fuel cells (MFC) and novel direct biomass fuel cells (DBFC) such as that mediated by polyoxometalates (POMs) developed recently....

This chapter will discuss the impact of trace metals in kraft cooking and brownstock washing Although numerous trace metals are present, calcium tends to be the main concern because it is present at higher concentration and is the source of most scale problems encountered in mills. Calcium Will also be the principal focus of this chapter. Other trace metals create management concerns in mills, but generally not within the brownstock washing system and cannot be effectively addressed Within that system.

The development of new and improved wood adhesives is hindered by an incomplete mechanistic understanding of what makes a wood-adhesive bond able to withstand changes in moisture levels. Although common methods are used to test and report the bulk level properties of bondlines, such as bondline shear strength and wood failure analysis, sufficient experimental tools to study wood-adhesive bondlines and the effects of moisture at the nm- to mm-length scales are lacking. Here we review recently developed tools that, when combined, are capable of studying bondlines and the effects of moisture...

Furfural and levulinic acid (LA) are potential major renewable platform chemicals for producing biochemicals and biofuels. In this study, integrated conversion of corncob to furfural and LA was carried out in a one-pot system using p-toluenesulfonic acid (p-TsOH) and step temperature profiling. A batch reaction incorporating distillation (BRD) resulted in a good furfural production yield of 61.6% based on the corncob xylan content for the hydrolysis conditions tested. Distillation not only reduced furfural loss due to side reactions to humins, but also resulted in a fairly pure and...

We report on the results of a multi-disciplinary project (including wood identification, radiocarbon dating and strontium isotope analysis) focused on a collection of pre-Columbian wooden carvings and human remains from Pitch Lake, Trinidad. While the lake's unusual conditions are conducive to the survival of organic artefacts, they also present particular challenges for analysis. There is a loss of any contextual association beyond that of the lake, and specific methodologies are required to deal with pitch contamination. A surprising taxonomic range of woods was employed for the various...

This paper evaluates the effects of acetylation level and experimental method on the observed fber saturation point (FSP) of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda)woodmeasuredusing differential scanning calorimetry. To achieve this goal, 1-mm-thick latewood samples were tested overawiderange of equilibrium moisture content(EMC). In this work, the FSP was defined as the non-freezable portion of water of the samples.Two experimental methods were used: the extrapolation of the melting enthalpy to zero and the direct calculation of the non-freezable water amount. For both methods, the FSP decreased with...