The Mechanics of Woods

This article discusses about a US lab that is trying to design economic incentives for removing some of the tinder from the country’s forests. The US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory is using engineering software to see if a liability in the wild can be turned into a commercially useful commodity. The Forest Products Lab has a vast amount of quantitative data on the properties of wood and wood composites. Its testing and evaluation history spans over 75 years. Its work has contributed to the standards that formed the country’s building codes. The basic analytical challenge is to determine fundamental properties and apply them correctly in computer models. For instance, there is the study of drying, pressing, and straightening wood with microwave ovens. The Forest Products Laboratory wants to find ways to use low-grade curved trees that can be cut into 2×4 studs by sawing along the grain of the wood.