This article discusses the 162-years history of only known nineteenth-century timber-frame farmers’ market in existence today. Designed by an architect, this immense building required great skill from tradespeople who built it old-growth Michigan white pine timbers. No machinery was used planing surfaces or cutting mortise-and-tenon joinery that holds structure together. It is without question ...

This report describes a recursive process for generating data sets of rigid rectangles that can be placed into rectangular regions with zero waste. The generation procedure can be modified to guarantee that the aspect and area ratios of the rectangles in the generated data sets satisfy user-specified parameters. This recursive process can thus be employed to create a variety of data sets that c...

Four approaches were used to estimate the market effects of wood chip mills for nonindustrial private forest (NIPF) landowners. First, we used economic welfare analyses to estimate potential changes in consumer and producer surplus that might be attributed to increased stumpage demand created by wood chip mills. Better markets would consistently increase economic returns for both timber buyers ...

Cutting and packing (C & P) problem is to allocate a set of items to larger rectangular standardized units by minimizing the waste. Bin packing, strip packing and cutting stock problem is well-known classical C & P problem. An overview is provided of several meta-heuristics algorithms of swarm intelligence from the literature for the 2D C & P problem. The objective of this paper is to present a...

Over 40% of high-purity silicon (Si) is consumed as sludge waste consisting of Si, silicon carbide (SiC) particles and metal impurities from the fragments of cutting wire mixed in ethylene glycol based cutting fluid during Si wafer slicing in semiconductor fabrication. Recovery of Si from the waste Si sludge has been a great concern because Si particles are promising high-capacity anode materia...

Fuel consumption is an important aspect of the efficiency of timber harvesting. Since loggers are paid based on the weight of wood they produce, it is important to note how many gallons of fuel it takes to produce one ton of wood. An extensive literature review was conducted to evaluate different harvesting systems and the amount of fuel they consumed per unit of wood that they produced. Result...