How arborists view the issue of “waste wood” is changing. The number of landfills has been steadily shrinking, while tipping fees at the remaining facilities are rising continually. Disposing of waste wood was once merely a time and labor factor, but now carries with it considerably more expense. Many arborists have adjusted to the higher cost of handling waste wood by looking for value-added m...

Last decades, wood was promoted as building material. Wood heat treatment by mild pyrolysis has been reported to improve biological durability and dimensional stability of the material and constitutes an attractive « non biocidal » alternative to classical preservation treatments. Previous studies have shown that conferred properties strongly depend on the heat treatment intensity. A quality co...

This article presents information on employment and payroll generated per unit volume of timber or wood fiber processed by the various manufacturing sectors of Montana's forest products industry for 19871989. Average employment ranged from a high of 117 workers per million cubic feet (mmcf) of wood fiber processed at house log plants, to a low of 12 workers per mmcf at stud mills. Employment-co...

Research on wood-flour-filled polypropylene has primarily focused on one species of wood flour and one or two broad particle-size distributions. To fully exploit the use of wood flour as a filler, the effects of species and particle size need to be examined. This study focused on the effects of both of these variables on the properties of polypropylene filled with wood flour. To examine the eff...

We address a complex scheduling problem in the wood panel industry with the objective of minimizing a quadratic function of job tardiness. The proposed solution strategy, which is based on an effective genetic algorithm, has been coded and implemented within a major north african compagny leader in the wood panel manufacturing. Experimental results indicate significant decrease of delivery times.

This paper describes an automated classifier for the identification of good wood and knotty wood from computer tomography (CT) images of logs. Such a system is intended to allow better assessment of saw logs before being cut into timber. We describe a new empirical model for the growth of Sitka Spruce (Picea Stichensis (Bong, Carr)) whose operation is adapted to Irish conditions. The use of Hop...