Treesearch

A 2014 review by Ringman et al. examined established theories addressing why modified wood has increased decay resistance and concluded that the most probable cause of inhibition and/or delay of the initiation of brown rot decay is lowering the equilibrium moisture content for given environmental conditions. A 2013 paper by Jakes et al. examined moisture induced wood damage mechanisms that do not appear in dry wood but have onsets at moisture contents below fibre saturation, including wood decay and fastener corrosion, and observed that these damage mechanisms require chemical transport...

In the United States, tornadoes cause significant damage and result in many injuries and deaths. Although the development and use of tornado safe rooms and shelters have helped reduce the human toll associated with these events, the cost of these structures is often too high for many that could benefit from their use. The development of a residential tornado safe room constructed from commodity wood building products, buildable by a local contractor or do-it-yourselfer, and adaptable to existing homes could lower the cost of these structures and result in more widespread use. In this...

With the adoption of a number of anti-illegal logging laws, treaties, memoranda, and international agreements around the world, there is broad and renewed interest in wood identification, especially in the field at the macroscopic level. In response to this interest, and to begin to fill an obvious gap in the corpus of wood anatomical reference material, we review several prominent Englishlanguage publications on macroscopic wood identification in order to form a list of characters. We compile characters and organize them in the spirit of the IAWA lists for hardwood and softwood microscopic...

We examined two case studies to demonstrate the advantages of sulfite chemistry for pretreating underutilized woody biomass to produce sugars through enzymatic saccharification. In the first case study, we evaluated knot rejects from a magnesium-basedsulfite mill for direct enzymatic sugar production.We found that the sulfite mill rejects are an excellent feedstock for sugar production. In the second study, we presented SPORL (sulfite pretreatment to overcome the recalcitrance of lignocelluloses),a sulfite pretreatment process based on modified sulfite pulping for robust bioconversion of...

Dr. Robert Hawthorne White had a 31 year career researching the fire performance of wood and wood composites at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory. Over his career, Dr. White made substantial contributions to codes, standards, and regulations pertaining to the design of wood structures. This review article summarizes Robert’s major accomplishments as a tribute to his career at the Forest Products Laboratory.

The fibrillation of a bleached kraft eucalyptus pulp was investigated by means of a laboratory-scale disk grinder for the production of cellulose nanofibrils (CNF), while the parameters disk rotating speed, solid loading, and fibrillation duration were varied. The cumulative energy consumption was monitored during fibrillation. The degree of polymerization (DP) and water retention value (WRV) of the resultant cellulose fibrils were determined as measures of the degree of fibrillation, which was also visualized by scanning electron microscopy, field emission-scanning electron microscopy,...

Composite sampling is standard practice for evaluation of preservative retention levels in preservative-treated wood. Current protocols provide an average retention value but no estimate of uncertainty. Here we describe a statistical method for calculating uncertainty estimates using the standard sampling regime with minimal additional chemical analysis. This tool can be used by wood treaters to generate lower prediction intervals that with a certain level of confidence give lower bounds on preservative retention estimates for a future analysis (e.g., by a customer) indicating whether the...

The elastic properties of pit membranes are reported to have important implications in understanding air-seeding phenomena in gymnosperms, and pit aspiration plays a large role in wood technological applications such as wood drying and preservative treatment. Here we present force–displacement measurements for pit membranes of circular bordered pits, collected on a mesomechanical testing system. The system consists of a quartz microprobe attached to a microforce sensor that is positioned and advanced with a micromanipulator mounted on an inverted microscope. Membrane displacement is...

Two isolates of Chlorociboria aeruginascens (Nyl.) Kanouse incubated axenically on aspen wood blocks resulted in 18% and 32% mass loss after 134 wks (2 yrs 8 mo). Aspen wood decayed by C. aeruginascens contained cavities in the S2 layer of the secondary cell wall, similar to Type I soft rot attack, as well as erosion troughs and overall thinning and erosion of wood cell walls, resembling decay by Type II soft rot fungi. Using a selective medium, basidiomycete fungi were isolated from 9 of 17 samples of wood from a variety of tree species colonized and stained by Chlorociboria sp. (putativel...