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This report is the result of a co-operative effort between the USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) Advanced Housing Research Center, the National Assocation of Home Builders (NAHB) Research Center, and builder members of the Metropolitan Mobile and Baldwin County Home Builders Associations. The study was undertaken to further knowledge that will improve wood utilization and performance in wood-framed housing, specifically in the area of wood raised floor design and wood usage in the Gulf Coast region of the country.

Cellulose accessibilities of a set of hornified lignocellulosic substrates derived by drying the never dried pretreated sample and a set of differently pretreated lodgepople pine substrates, were evaluated using solute exclusion and protein adsorption methods. Direct measurements of cellulase adsorption onto cellulose surface of the set of pretreated substrates were also carried out using an in situ UV–Vis spectrophotometric technique. The cellulose accessibilities measured by the solute exclusion and a cellulose-binding module (CBM)-containing green fluorescent protein (TGC) adsorption...

Environmental impacts associated with the building industry have become of increasing importance. Materials and energy consumed during manufacture of building materials such as lumber affect a building’s environmental performance. This study determined environmental impacts of manufacturing hardwood lumber in the southeastern US using the life-cycle inventory method. Primary data were collected and then weight-averaged on a per-unit basis of 1.0 m3 of planed dry lumber (600 oven-dry kg/m3) to find material flows and energy use. Cumulative allocated energy consumption for manufacturing 1.0...

Numerical and three-dimensional finite element models were developed to improve understanding of major factors affecting hygroelastic wood properties. Effects of chemical composition, microfibril angle, crystallinity, structure of microfibrils, moisture content, and hydrophilicity of the cell wall were included in the model. Wood from wild-type and decreased-lignin transgenic aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) was used for experimental validation of the computer model. The model was able to predict longitudinal elastic modulus of microfibrils and woody cell walls. The difference in...

Forest products sector products and income help sustain the social, economic, and ecological benefits of forestry in the United States. Solidwood products consumption increased with population between 1965 and 2008 and varied with housing starts. Lumber's share declined from 83% to 70%, and structural panels' share increased from 9% to 17%. Paper and paperboard consumption increased with gross domestic product until 1999, then stopped increasing partly due to a shift in advertising to electronic media and a shift from domestic manufacturing to imports of manufactured products. Roundwood...

Belize is home to two commercially important species of Dalbergia, D. stevensonii and D. tucurensis, whose overall appearance and wood anatomy are similar. D. stevensonii is protected from commercial harvesting, whereas D. tucurensis is not. Therefore, reliable methods for separating the two species are important. Comparison of samples from the Center for Wood Anatomy Research at the Forest Products Laboratory demonstrated that density can reliably separate the species. Freshly cut surfaces of D. stevensonii were sometimes fluorescent, but they never were in D. tucurensis. Ethanol extracts...

Dilute acid (DA) and Sulfite Pretreatment to Overcome Recalcitrance of Lignocelluloses (SPORL) pretreatments were directly applied to wood chips of four poplar wood samples of different genotypes (hereafter referred to as poplars; Populus tremuloides Michx. ‘native aspen collection’; Populus deltoides Bartr. ex Marsh x Populus nigra L. ‘NE222’ and ‘DN5’; P. nigra x Populus maximowiczii A. Henry ‘NM6’) to evaluate their bioconversion potential. Plant biomass recalcitrance (PBR) was defined to quantitatively determine the recalcitrance of the poplars. Using DA pretreatment, NM6 produced the...

Physical, mechanical, and fire properties of the flat-pressed wood plastic composites (WPCs) incorporated with various fire retardants (10% by weight) at different levels of wood flour (WF) content, 40, 50, or 60 wt%, were investigated. The WPC panels were made from dry-blended WF, polypropylene (PP), and fire retardant (FR) powders with maleic anhydride-grafted PP (2 wt%) formulations using a conventional flat-pressing process under laboratory conditions. Incorporation of the fire retardants into the WPC panels significantly decreased the internal bond strength compared to the WPC panels...

Pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass by Ν-methylmorpholine-Ν-oxide (NMMO), a solvent used in the textile industry to dissolve cellulose for production of regenerated cellulose fibers, was observed to enhance significantly enzymatic saccharification and fermentation. The enhancement was speculated to have been caused by reduced cellulose crystallinity after dissolution and precipitation processes. This work focused on assessing several physical changes and their correlations to enzymatic saccharification of pine flour after NMMO pretreatment. Results from microstructure, surface chemical...

Wood structural panel (WSP) sheathed shear walls and diaphragms are the primary lateral-load-resistingelements in wood-frame construction. The historical performance of light-frame structures in North America is very good due, in part, to model building codes that are designed to safeguard life safety. These model building codes have spawned continual improvement and refinement of engineeringsolutions. There is also an inherent redundancy of wood-frame construction using WSP shear walls and diaphragms. As wood-frame construction is continuously evolving, designers in many parts of North...