Treesearch

What are the market conditions for woodworkers involved in the construction-based sectors and what are some of the investments being planned to improve their capabilities? For perspective, the total value of private construction (residential and nonresidential) put in place in the United States was more than $1.5 trillion dollars in 2023 ($1,541,063 million), up 4.7% from 2022 based on U.S. Census Bureau figures. This increase was driven largely by increased spending on nonresidential construction. Spending decreased for single-family housing (-13.5%) and residential improvements (-4.6%)...

This article presents and describes a dataset for the bills of materials for the buildings constructed with mass timber (MT), structural steel (SS), and reinforced concrete (RC), which are generated using Athena’s Impact Estimator for Buildings (IE4B) software to conduct a whole building life-cycle assessment (WBLCA). These data are associated with the research article Environmental Impact Assessment of Mass Timber, Structural Steel, and Reinforced Concrete Buildings Based on the 2021 International Building Code Provisions [1]. This dataset was utilized to estimate their environmental...

Biodiesel, an eco-friendly and sustainable alternative to diesel, has gained increasing interest over the past few years. The reuse of waste cooking oil as a feedstock for biodiesel production is affordable and environmentally safe. This study aimed to understand the understudied benefits of using zinc-doped biochar as a catalyst for biodiesel production. The zinc-doped biochar catalyst was characterized using techniques such as scanning electron microscope with energy-dispersive X-ray (SEM-EDAX) analysis and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) analysis, which revealed the morphological and...

Objective: New characterized carbohydrate-active enzymes are needed for use as tools to discriminate complex carbohydrate structural features. Fungal glycoside hydrolase family 3 (GH3) β-xylosidases have been shown to be useful for the structural elucidation of glucuronic acid (GlcA) and arabinofuranose (Araf) substituted oligoxylosides. A homolog of these GH3 fungal enzymes from the bacterium Segatella baroniae (basonym Prevotella bryantii), Xyl3C, has been previously characterized, but those studies did not address important functional specificity features. In an interest to utilize this...

Fire experiments were conducted to observe the effect of varying amounts of exposed timber wall and ceiling assemblies in a standard room-corner fire test. The standard test, NFPA 286 (Fire Tests for Evaluating Contribution of Wall and Ceiling Interior Finish to Room Fire Growth) is based on a room with a door opening at the front and a gas burner located against a back corner. Pass or fail criteria for flashover are provided for the test, with the test lasting up to a maximum of 15 min. Three experiments were conducted that comply with the 2021 International Building Code for amount of...

Pyrolysis of wood involves the thermal degradation of the wood polymers and the formation of char. Understanding how char forms, particularly, in terms of the nano-structural changes that take place during pyrolysis will inform fire models to ensure fire safety in timber structures. Here, small- and wide-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS/WAXS) based tomography were used to study how thermal degradation changes wood nanostructure across the pyrolysis zone in Douglas-fir. The changes in the aggregation of cellulose elementary fibrils (via SAXS) as well as changes in the cellulose crystallinity...

Eastern subterranean termites, Reticulitermes flavipes (Kollar), are widely distributed across North America where they are exposed to a broad range of environmental conditions. However, mechanisms for overwintering are not well understood. Wisconsin is a unique location to study mechanisms of cold tolerance as it represents the northern boundary for persistent R. flavipes populations. In this study, we evaluated seasonal shifts in cold tolerance using critical thermal minimum (CTmin) and supercooling point (SCP) and examined how these measurements correlate to changes in the microbial...

The mass loss calorimeter provides a robust method for evaluating flammability of very sooty materials such as wood plastic composites as a lower cost and rugged alternative to the reliable and effective cone calorimeter. The high amounts of smoke and carbon monoxide associated with these materials resulted in a much-reduced heat release rate, resulting in incomplete combustion of the diffusion flame, which required modifications to the standards in measuring heat release rate via oxygen consumption or carbon dioxide production or thermopiles. In addition to liquid fuels of ethylene glycol...

Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) were investigated as a partial substitution for agar in growth media for wood decay fungi. Radial growth measurements of eight basidiomycete fungi were taken on solid growth media with and without CNFs. Additionally, fungal strain virulence was evaluated using the European CSN Standard EN 113-2 wood decay durability test. The inclusion of CNFs did not significantly affect fungal growth rates on media or in wood decay tests. Rheological evaluations showed that gels from standard malt extract agar were significantly stronger and stiffer than those prepared by a...

Regioselective C6 and C2,C3 carboxylated cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) have been robustly generated from dissolving pulp, a readily available source of unmodified cellulose, via stoichiometrically optimized 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpyperidine-1-oxyl (TEMPO)-mediated and sequential sodium periodate-sodium chlorite (PC) oxidation coupled with high-speed blending. Both regioselectively optimized carboxylated CNF series possess the widest ranges of comparable charges (0.72–1.48 mmol/g for T-CNFs vs. 0.72–1.10 mmol/g for PC-CNFs), but similar ranges of thickness (1.3–2.4 nm for T-CNF, 1.8–2.7 nm...