Structural products made of beech wood: quality assessment of the raw material
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Structural products made of beech wood: quality assessment of the raw material Michele Brunetti1 · Michela Nocetti1,2 · Benedetto Pizzo1 · Giovanni Aminti1 · Corrado Cremonini3 · Francesco Negro3 · Roberto Zanuttini3 · Manuela Romagnoli4 · Giuseppe Scarascia Mugnozza4 Received: 13 September 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Hardwood timber is becoming increasingly important in Europe for its use as structural material, both as solid wood and engineered structural products. In Italy, the great abundance of beech forests has recently led to a research project to investigate the use of this species in construction. A first step is the characterization of the raw material for the production of structural glued products. This requires developing the strength grading of beech boards, both by visual and machine methods. To the aim, four provenances were collected across the distribution of beech in Italy. The main strength reducing characteristics were measured visually, and the dynamic modulus of elasticity was determined before performing the destructive bending tests of sampled boards. Correlations between properties were similar to what is usually observed for softwoods with the exception of density, which did not correlate with any other property. Several visual rules and machine settings were developed and compared, showing the effectiveness of both methods for the strength grading of beech. The grading yields for the high strength classes were very similar for machine and visual grading, while the machine permitted to reduce the number of rejected elements when two grades were selected at the same time.
1 Introduction Increasing the use of hardwoods in structural applications is a relevant topic in Europe (Aicher et al. 2014). Several factors contribute to promoting the use of hardwoods in construction: Europe is rich in large, underused hardwood forests; various European countries are encouraging re-afforestation with hardwood species to face forest disturbances such as windstorms; for this reason, the use of hardwoods falls within the growing interest in timber as a sustainable material for bio-building. Overall, new perspectives for European hardwoods, namely ash, beech, sweet chestnut, and oak, can arise in the coming years in the construction sector. * Michela Nocetti [email protected] 1
CNR-IBE, Institute of BioEconomy, Via Madonna del Piano 10, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, FI, Italy
2
Department of Forest and Wood Science, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch 7600, South Africa
3
Department of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences, University of Torino, 10095 Grugliasco, TO, Italy
4
Department of Innovation for Biological, Agrifood and Forest System, University of Tuscia, 01100 Viterbo, Italy
In this context, beech wood is particularly interesting given the abundance of European beech forests that can regularly supply large-scale productions. The load-bearing capacity of beech wood has long been exploited by producing plywood f
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