Abstract
Ring shake is a widespread phenomenon affecting a great number of species of both softwood and hardwood and is found in trees grown in temperate and tropical climates. Chestnut (Castanea sativa Mill.) represents one of the most important hardwood timbers that is very often affected by ring shake. This defect seems to be the only real limit to the spread and use of chestnut wood worldwide on a scale closer to the availability of this wood. The aim of this study was to examine the potential of tomographic measurement as a non-destructive method for predicting the possibility of the presence of ring shake in standing chestnut trees. For this reason, the experiments were carried out in a chestnut coppice stand where one hundred chestnut standards were monitored using an acoustic tomographic device, and subsequently harvested by a local company and cross-sectioned corresponding to the acoustic tests. This work proposed an applied approach to predicting and determining wood quality (sound wood vs. defective wood) from tomographic data. The model, based on a non-linear approach, showed that sonic tomography can identify ring shake in a tree trunk without affecting its biological activity, overcoming the difficulties of predicting ring shake using only visual inspection.
Highlights
Several technologies were introduced in the early twentieth century in Europe and North America to assess wood quality in standing trees in response to the numerous requests by wood products manufacturers and forest managers worldwide
The use of acoustic tomography technology is beneficial for appropriate tree management in urban communities; an acoustic tomographic device permits the acquisition of data from the inner part of the trees, and the tomograms allow the determination of the stability of the trees to minimize the risk of tree failure
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study that evaluates non-destructive technologies (NDT) techniques for predicting ring shake in standing chestnut trees, but several researchers have addressed accurately the effective prediction of sonic tomography using simultaneous NDT and destructive tests; comparison of the results reported here with those available in the literature has been partially difficult
Summary
Several technologies were introduced in the early twentieth century in Europe and North America to assess wood quality in standing trees in response to the numerous requests by wood products manufacturers and forest managers worldwide. Numerous previous studies have determined, using this tomograph method, different types of structural defects, such as heartwood and sapwood decay, internal and lateral cracks, ring shake and hollows in urban trees (Bucur 2003; Nicolotti et al 2003; Deflorio et al 2008; Lin et al 2008; Feng et al 2014; Rinn 2015). Several years after its use became widespread in urban forestry, some researchers have turned this NDT technique from urban forestry to the wood products industry for determining wood properties; the potential of this technology for assessing the quality of high-value hardwood trees in production forests has not been fully investigated (Wang et al 2005)
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