The specific gravity (SG) of wood is a measure of the amount of structural material a tree species allocates to support and strength. In recent years, wood specific gravity, traditionally a forester's variable, has become the domain of ecologists exploring the universality of plant functional traits and conservationists estimating global carbon stocks. While these developments have expanded our...

This paper presents a concept of wood quality. The heart of the concept is: Quality is the resultant of physical and chemical characteristics possessed by a tree or a part of a tree that enable it to meet the property requirements for different end products. In other words, the intrinsic quality of wood evaluated solely in terms of its suitability for various products or end uses. A number of t...

Sustainable and inexpensive production of biomass is necessary to make biofuel production feasible, but represents a challenge. Five short rotation coppice willow cultivars, selected for high biomass yield, were cultivated on sites at four diverse regions of Quebec in contrasting environments. Wood composition and anatomical traits were characterized. Tree height and stem diameter were measured...

Vessels and tracheids represent the most important xylem cells with respect to long distance water transport in plants. Wood anatomical studies frequently provide several quantitative details of these cells, such as vessel diameter, vessel density, vessel element length, and tracheid length, while important information on the three dimensional structure of the hydraulic network is not considere...

Non-isothermal crystallization of neat high density polyethylene (HDPE), wood flour (WF)/HDPE composite (WPC), virgin Kevlar fiber (KF) reinforced WPC (KFWPC), and grafted Kevlar fiber (GKF) reinforced WPC (GKFWPC) was investigated by means of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and wide angle X-ray diffraction (WAXD). Several theoretical models were applied to describe the process of nonis...

The particle size distribution of wood chips, along with the moisture content, are some of the main parameters for defining the quality of most wood fuels. A new experimental rotor, powered by the self-propelled forage harvester Claas Jaguar was developed by the Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l'analisi dell'economia agraria (CRA), Agricultural Engineering Research Unit (CRA-ING). The...

In this study, beech wood was treated in hot oil and in hot air to determine the differences in the effects of the two processes on the physical properties of the wood. Heat treatment was conducted at temperatures of 160, 190, and 220 °C for 2 h at atmospheric pressure. After the heat treatment, various properties of the wood, including mass increase in hot oil treatment (wt% gain), mass loss i...

High-melting-temperature poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) was successfully introduced into wood plastic composites through a two-step reactive extrusion technology. Wood flour was added into pre-prepared PET/high density polyethylene (HDPE) microfibrillar blends (MFBs) in the second extrusion at the temperature for processing HDPE. Addition of 25% in situ formed PET microfibers obviously incr...

The wood samples were tested by the technique of stress wave, and the testing results were analyzed by using the statistic software of SPSS. The results showed that the length, density and knots of wood, the sizes of holes and numbers of holes have significant influence on propagation parameters and dynamic modulus of elasticity. Under the same specifications, the propagation time of the stress...

BACKGROUND Traits of non-dominant mixed-forest tree species and their synergies for successful co-occurrence in monodominant Gilbertiodendron dewevrei forest have not yet been investigated. Here we compared the tree species diversity of the monodominant forest with its adjacent mixed forest and then determined which fitness proxies and life history traits of the mixed-forest tree species were m...