A tomographic approach to assessing the possibility of ring shake presence in standing chestnut trees
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ORIGINAL
A tomographic approach to assessing the possibility of ring shake presence in standing chestnut trees Andrea R. Proto1 · Maria F. Cataldo1 · Corrado Costa2 · Salvatore F. Papandrea1 · Giuseppe Zimbalatti1 Received: 18 November 2019 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Ring shake is a widespread phenomenon affecting a great number of species of both softwood and hardwood and is found in trees grown in temperate and tropical climates. Chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) represents one of the most important hardwood timbers that is very often affected by ring shake. This defect seems to be the only real limit to the spread and use of chestnut wood worldwide on a scale closer to the availability of this wood. The aim of this study was to examine the potential of tomographic measurement as a non-destructive method for predicting the possibility of the presence of ring shake in standing chestnut trees. For this reason, the experiments were carried out in a chestnut coppice stand where one hundred chestnut standards were monitored using an acoustic tomographic device, and subsequently harvested by a local company and cross-sectioned corresponding to the acoustic tests. This work proposed an applied approach to predicting and determining wood quality (sound wood vs. defective wood) from tomographic data. The model, based on a non-linear approach, showed that sonic tomography can identify ring shake in a tree trunk without affecting its biological activity, overcoming the difficulties of predicting ring shake using only visual inspection.
1 Introduction Several technologies were introduced in the early twentieth century in Europe and North America to assess wood quality in standing trees in response to the numerous requests by wood products manufacturers and forest managers worldwide. A significant effort has been devoted to developing robust non-destructive technologies (NDT) that are capable of predicting the intrinsic wood properties of individual trees and assessing wood quality at the stand and forest scale. Wood quality can be assessed by several techniques, such as the use of penetrometers and drilling resistometers, acoustic methods and imaging (Pellerin and Ross 2002). Drilling resistance measurement is a semi-destructive method commonly used for wood defect detection where a thin steel probe penetrates into the wood. Low resistance in a resistance profile typically indicates decay, cavities, or large * Andrea R. Proto [email protected] 1
Department of AGRARIA, University of Reggio Calabria, Feo di Vito snc, 89122 Reggio Calabria, Italy
Consiglio Per La Ricerca in Agricoltura E Analisi Dell’economia Agraria (CREA), via Della Pascolare 16, 00016 Monterotondo, RM, Italy
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internal cracks (Wu et al. 2018), but one problem with this technique is that the results are restricted to a single perforation, with no scanning of the cross-section. The acoustic method is based on the observation of stress wave propagation. In general, stress waves travel faster in high-quality wood than in deteriorated and low
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