Workshop on Commercial Application of IR Spectroscopies to Solid Wood

Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has been used for timber, pulp and paper applications for over 20 years. Despite a lot of R&D work on solid wood applications for both field and in-process use, the industry has not adopted NIR as a routine technique. Solid wood has proven to be a challenging sample type to analyse in real time by NIR as the modern timber mill processes logs at a very fast rate. The available instrumentation has, up until the recently, been too slow for on-line measurements in this environment. This paper describes the performance requirements for NIR systems for solid wood processing and discusses the various instruments available.