Treesearch

Five wooden sculptures from the pre-contact Caribbean, long held in museum collections, are here dated and given a context for the first time. The examples studied were made from dense Guaiacum wood, carved, polished and inlaid with shell fastened with resin. Dating the heartwood, sapwood and resins takes key examples of ‘Classic’ Ta´ýno art back to the tenth century AD, and suggests that some objects were treasured and refurbished over centuries. The authors discuss the symbolic properties of the wood and the long-lived biographies of some iconic sculptures.

The need for accurate and rapid field identification of wood to combat illegal logging around the world is outpacing the ability to train personnel to perform this task. Despite increased interest in non-anatomical (DNA, spectroscopic, chemical) methods for wood identification, anatomical characteristics are the least labile data that can be extracted from solid wood products, independent of wood processing (sawing, drying, microbial attack). Wood identification using anatomical characteristics is thus still a viable approach to the wood identification problem, and automating the process...

The movement of firewood within emerald ash borer- (EAB-) infested states and into adjoining states has been a major contributor to the spread of EAB throughout the United States and Canada. In an effort to stop the further spread of EAB from infested areas and to facilitate interstate commerce, USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has required and are enforcing a heat-treatment process in the firewood industry to heat sterilize firewood before it can be shipped out of infested areas. States and firewood producers are now faced with challenges implementing heat-treatment...

Note that the chemical retention calculations in Table 1 of the original publication have been corrected. Click

Mechanistic pyrolysis kinetics analysis of extractives, holocellulose, and lignin in solid wood over entire heating regime was possible using specialized cone calorimeter test and new mathematical analysis tools. Added hardware components include: modified sample holder for thin specimen with tiny thermocouples, methane ring burner with stainless steel mesh above cone heater, and water vapor sensor in heated gas sampling lines. Specialized numerical deconvolutions were applied to oxygen and water vapor analyzer signals to synchronize with rapid responding CO/CO2 analyzer signals. From this...

Biomass gasification is an approach to producing energy and/or biofuels that could be integrated into existing forest product production facilities, particularly at pulp mills. Existing process heat and power loads tend to favor integration at existing pulp mills. This paper describes a generic modeling system for evaluating integrated biomass gasification business concepts over a range of production scales and process options, including process models and a discounted cash-flow model, all of which are contained in a Microsoft® (Redmond, Washington) Office Excel workbook (available from...

New product provides a easy way for companies to identify the surface area of threaded and nonthreaded fasteners, especially as changes in wood preservative treatments act to accelerate metal fastener corrosion in wood.

Tannins and pH are often cited as factors that affect the corrosiveness of wood yet there are few data to confirm these statements. The purpose of this paper is to systematically investigate the effect of tannins and pH on corrosion of metals in wood. Four wood species known to vary in both their pH and extractives were chosen and extracted with water. The pH, tannin content, and corrosion rate of carbon steel were determined for each extract. To test if pH and tannin were the only factors influencing corrosion, ‘‘synthetic’’ extracts were made by adding tannins to distilled water and...

This study investigated physical, mechanical, and fire properties of the flat-pressed wood plastic composites (WPCs) incorporated with various fire retardants (FRs) [5 or 15% by weight (wt)] at 50 wt % of the wood flour (WF). The WPC panels were made from dry-blended WF, polypropylene (PP) with maleic anhydride grafted PP (2 wt %), and FR powder formulations using a conventional flat-pressing process under laboratory conditions. The water resistance and strength values of the WPC panels were negatively affected by increasing the FR content as compared to the WPC panels without FR. The WPC...