Abstract
ABSTRACTWood exhibits a highly diversified microstructure. It appears as a solid-type composite material at a length scale of some micrometers, while it resembles an assembly of plate-like elements arranged in a honeycomb fashion at the length scale of some hundreds of micrometers. These structural features of wood result in different load carrying mechanisms at different observation scales and at different loading conditions. In this paper, we elucidate the main load carrying mechanisms by means of a micromechanical model for wood across different species, based on tissue-independent stiffness properties of cellulose, lignin, and water. The model comprises three homogenization steps, two based on continuum micromechanics and one on the unit cell method. The latter represents plate-like bending and shear of the cell walls, due to transverse shear loading and axial straining in the tangential direction Accurate representation of these deformation modes results in accurate (orthotropic) stiffness estimates, which deviate, on average, by less than 10 % from corresponding experimental results, across a variety of softwood species.
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