Wood protection used to focus mainly on naturally durable wood species, often from tropical regions, or treating non-durable wood species with fungicidal wood preservatives. General awareness of the negative impact of biocidal products on the environment initiated a new way of thinking about wood protection. Modern methods to protect wood from degradation aims at increasing the service life of the material by removing or reducing a pre-requisite for fungal degradation: water within the material. This can be done by wood mod-ification, such as acetylation or heat treatment. However, there is a lack of understanding of what happens within the wood, which hampers optimization and development of modification techniques and processes.
As part of the MODUWOOD project, two types of thermal treatments are investigated. In the high-acidic process, both heating and cooling occur at high pressure in a closed process. The low-acidic process is similar, but the cooling phase occurs at atmospheric pressure, hereby evaporating volatile chemicals formed during the thermal treatment. For both treatments, we investigate how changes in material chemistry affect wood-water interactions and the resistance to fungal degradation in Scots pine.
Keywords: thermal modification, wood-wa-ter interactions, LFNMR
Authors
Liselotte De Ligne
University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 23, 1958 Frederiksberg C, Denmark
Maria Fredriksson
Lunds universitet, Building Materials, Box 118, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
Emil Thybring
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
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