Nowadays, there are many ongoing studies on the developments in the wooden construction industry. The example of engineering wood product (EWP) which is constantly gaining a popularity in constructions is glued laminated timber (GLT) (Mirski et al. 2020a). Its wide application results from the features, which are similar to the solid wood such as: good strength, light weight, durability, elasticity etc. Moreover, an important factor is that the layered structure enables the production of сomponents having variable crosssectional height as needed (Mirski et al. 2020b). The timber intended to structural application requires strength grading, the knowledge of the wood structure and the defects that pieces of timber may have. The commonly determined parameter indicating the strength of the material is the modulus of elasticity (MOE) in static bending. The higher the modulus is, the better technological quality of wood is which consequently determines the possible application. The strength grading can be assessed based on the visual inspection or machine-assisted methods. The visual assessments takes a long time and the efficiency of examining every piece is relatively low due to the time-consuming process (Krzosek et al. 2020). In order to keep up with the developments in engineering wood products the strength grading has started to be made with the use of the machines. The machines, which are automatic devices able to grading considerably faster than people and they have to meet the basic requirements such as: non-destructive strength grading and the adaptation to full size structural elements grading (Olsson and Oscarsson 2017, Krzosek et al. 2020). The aim of the study was to compare the results of pine timber strength grading using the two different machine-based methods.
Keywords: engineered wood products, grading, testing, glued laminated timber
Authors
J. Kawalerczyk
D. Dziurka
M. Wieruszewski
J. Siuda
A. Trociński
S. Krzosek
Janis Rizikovs
R. Mirski
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