The grading of wood veneers according to their true mechanical potential is an important issue in the peeling industry. Unlike in the sawmilling industry, this activity does not currently estimate the local properties of production. The potential of the tracheid effect, which enables local fiber orientation measurement, has been widely documented for sawn products. A measuring instrument exploiting this technology and implemented on a peeling line was developed, enabling us to obtain the fiber orientation locally which, together with global density, allowed us to model the local elastic properties of each veneer. A sorting method using this data was developed and is presented here. It was applied to 286 veneers from several logs of French Douglas fir, and was compared to a widely used sorting method based on veneer appearance defects. The effectiveness of both grading approaches was quantified according to mechanical criteria. This study shows that the sorting method used (based on local fiber orientation and average density) allows for better theorical quality discrimination according to the mechanical potential. This article is the first in a series, with the overall aim of enhancing the use of heterogeneous wood veneers in the manufacturing of maximized-performance LVL by veneer grading and optimized positioning as well as material mechanical property modelization.
Key messageThe TreeTrace_Douglas database includes images and measurements at several stages of the processing of Douglas fir logs, from sawmill logyard to machine grading and destructive testing of boards, and is suitable for research on quality assessment and traceability. A total of 52 long logs, 156 short logs, 208 wood discs, and 346 boards were analyzed. The image data includes RGB images of log ends and board ends, RGB images and CT slices of strips, and a set of images of the boards (RGB, laser, and X-rays) obtained with an industrial board grading machine. The measurements include wood density, growth ring widths, pith and board location in the logs, heartwood and sapwood areas, mechanical properties of each board obtained by vibratory and static testing, and visual grading of the boards. Dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.15454/YUNEGL and associated metadata are available at https://metadata-afs.nancy.inra.fr/geonetwork/srv/fre/catalog.search#/metadata/d9eef6e4-f195-41f4-b6c2-2ab46adc637e.
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