Restoration programs effectively prevent or mitigate wildfires and pest outbreaks in the forest lands. The most common approach is to selectively harvest smaller and dead trees in order to preserve larger and superior trees. Ponderosa pine, Pinus ponderosa, (PP) lumber is one of the common species harvested from restoration programs...
Timber-concrete composite (TCC) solutions originated in the early twentieth century. There has been a renewed interest in TCC solutions in modern mass timber buildings, especially for floor systems. However due to lack of data, design standards, and code acceptance, TCC solutions require that new mass timber solutions be tested, and...
Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) is a prefabricated building material that is relatively new to the United States and North America. It consists of no less than three layers of graded, dimensional lumber glued in alternating longitudinal and transverse layers to create a panel that can be used for various building applications...
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a massive engineered wood product made of orthogonally bonded layers of solid-sawn lumber, and is intended for roof, floor, or wall applications. Although it was developed in Europe in the early 90s, CLT is relatively new to North America.
CLT products must be certified for structural...
Chainsaws, an indispensable tool for modern forestry operations, rely on bar lubricant to prevent rapid wear of the chain and bar. Choice of bar lubricant must balance performance, cost, and biological impact. Many bar lubricants are available, but little published work exists that conclusively ranks the performance of these choices....
This study computationally and experimentally examines the mechanisms of crack penetration, deflection and the transition between penetration and deflection. The finite element analysis based computational modeling work used strength-and-energy based cohesive-zone approach to study the effect of dimensionless parameters (e.g., interfacial incident angle, fracture-length scale, and normalized toughness) on penetration/deflection...
Most of existing commercial unsaturated polyester (UPE) resins are typically composed of a UPE and a high amount of highly volatile, flammable, and toxic styrene. The emission of hazardous styrene in the handling of the UPE resins and the preparation and use of fiber-reinforced UPE composites poses severe hazards to...
The mechanical performance of composite materials is determined by the mechanical properties of their individual components and the effective load transfer between these components. Binders are commonly used to bond composite components together and to provide effective load transfer between them. In wood-based composites the binder-component load transfer occurs at...
Dental resin composites are widely used in modern dentistry due to their aesthetic appearance. However, resin based restorations have inferior mechanical properties (fracture is the second reason for restorations replacement) in comparison to alloy based composites and their antimicrobial properties still remain poor, leading to secondary tooth decay development on...
There is no doubt that adhesive penetration plays an important role in wood bondline joint performance and durability; yet, to date there is no direct experimental evidence linking penetration depth with bond performance. This is, in part, because adhesive penetration is commonly assessed with various 2D microscopy techniques that are...