The brown-rotted wood was liquefied in phenol with phosphoric acid as catalyst and the resulting liquefied products were condensed with formaldehyde to yield novolak liquefied wood-based phenol formaldehyde resin (LWPF). The results showed that brown-rotted wood could be more easily liquefied than sound wood in phenol. The residue content of liquefied wood decreased continually with the progres...

For industrial purposes such as product design, texture displays should deliver a quality sense of touch to users. We have developed a vibrotactile texture display that uses real materials such as fabric, wood, and leather to enable the presentation of quality textures to users. By applying two types of vibrotactile stimuli to users’ finger pads through the materials, their fine and macro rough...

Struvite precipitation is a simple technology for phosphorus recovery from source-separated urine. However, production costs can be high if expensive magnesium salts are used as precipitants. Therefore, waste products can be interesting alternatives to industrially-produced magnesium salts. We investigated the technical and financial feasibility of wood ash as a magnesium source in India. In ba...

Nacrtak For sanitary reasons, spruce trees affected by bark beetles (Ips typographus L.) should be removed out of the stand as soon as possible, to avoid the propagation of the beetles to healthy trees. One possibility, to utilize the accruing crown material in a reasonable way (instead of burning it) could be, to use it as wood-chips for biomass heating plants. The aim of this project was ther...

The concept of traceability is defined according to the standard ISO 8402 like “the ability for the retrieval of the history and use or location of an article or an activity through a registered identification”. Their implementation in the wood industry is delayed because of the limits of classical automatic identification systems in regard to the nature of wood and the features of the manufact...

Depolymerization of lignin in wood with hydrogen iodide in a nonpolar solvent is a selective, high-yield reaction that releases a diiodide of potential synthetic value into the solution. Finely milled wood (Douglas-fir, spruce, aspen, and sugarcane), was suspended in CDCl3 and treated with dry hydrogen iodide in a NMR tube. The yields and composition of the chloroform-soluble monomeric lignin d...

Ultrasonic energy was applied to assist the wood vacuum drying process. At a drying temperature of 60°C, the absolute pressure was either 0.05 MPa or 0.08 MPa; the ultrasonic power and frequency were 100 W and 28 kHz, respectively. The results showed that the effective water diffusivity of the specimens dried by the ultrasonic assisted vacuum drying at 0.05 MPa or 0.08 MPa were higher than that...

To evaluate the potential environmental and health implications of leaching of wood preservatives in service under different conditions, there is a need for a predictive model that provides estimates of the rate and extent of leaching over a wide range of exposure conditions. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that preservative component emissions can be modeled on the basis of three easily ...

Thermal modifications tend to darken wood color and enhance dimensional stability, erosion resistance, weather resistance, and product value. To investigate the chemical characteristics of VOCs influenced by the heat treatment process, air-dried poplar wood was heat-treated at four treatment temperatures (160,180, 200, and 220 °C) for 2 h. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) was used to investigat...

In the present work pyrolysis of pure pine wood and softwood carbohydrates, namely cellulose and galactoglucomannan (the major hemicellulose in coniferous wood), was conducted in a batch mode operated fluidized bed reactor. Temperature ramping (5 degrees C/min) was applied to the heating until a reactor temperature of 460 degrees C was reached. Thereafter the temperature was kept until the rele...