SIRT and the BBC

Last year I was part of the Ask Yan team for the BBC TV science series "Bang Goes The Theory". I answered quite a lot of the questions in my spare time - almost as many as Yan! ...including one about why cork trees make cork.

The second series starts on March 15th...so if you have any tree or wood related questions you want to reach a wide audience do please send them in to Yan.

Keeping in touch with standards development

The new version of EN338 will contain a big change to the shear strengths of the timber grades. Related to this there have been changes afoot in the testing standard EN408 which includes an equation to modify global MoE to correct for shear stiffness G...a correction that is already taken care of (by a different equation) in EN384! Some of our thoughts on that topic are covered here.

Keeping abreast of changes on codes and standards isn't easy, but the British Standards Institute has just launched a new service that might help people do just that. As well as the subscription based BSIonline (which has live standards and drafts out for comment) there will be:

http://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com - Aiming to provide a more user-friendly way for people to access information relating to standards in development.

And http://standardsproposals.bsigroup.com - a public access area for proposals for new standards and revisions of existing ones.

Don't also forget that we now sit on the UK timber grading committee and BSI committee B/518 (structural timber) so if you have any concerns relating to standards about timber grading you can speak to us.

COST E53 conference registration open

Registration is now open for the conference. You can register online here. You can view the programme and other details here. By way of a reminder, this is what the conference is about...

The Centre for Timber Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University will be hosting the final conference of COST Action E53 this spring. The conference, which is to he held at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh's historic Holyrood area, will be focused on issues of quality control for wood and wood products including:

* Understanding end user requirements for wood and wood products.
* Scanning of stems, logs and boards for characterisation of geometrical and quality properties.
* Wood drying, distortion and determination of moisture content.
* Assessment of strength, stiffness and visual appearance of timber and wood products.
* Future trends in technology, wood characteristics, and end user requirements.

The full conference runs from the 4-7th May 2010, but there will be two days of particular interest to industry. These days are the 'industry focussed day' (5th May 2010) and a workshop by the European Wood Drying Group (4th May 2010). The aim is to disseminate the results of the four years of pan European research cooperation in this COST Action - and to get feedback and discussion from producers and end users.

Assessing Scots pine timber quality

Recently I gave a presentation on the mechanical properties of Scots pine at the one-day seminar on Scots pine timber quality in north Scotland that was hosted by Forestry Commission, Scottish Enterprise and Highlands & Islands Enterprise. All the presentations from this event are available by clicking here. In addition, I help to co-author a Research Note with Elspeth Macdonald, Tom Connolly and Barry Gardiner from Forest Research which describes the development of methods for assessing the quality of Scots pine timber. An electronic version of this publication (FCRN005) can be downloaded free of charge here.

SIRT at the Botanic Gardens

John Moore, Stefan Lehneke and myself were at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Gardens last Sunday (the 8th November) giving a free walk-in workshop for children and parents about the science of wood. This included viewing wood under microscopes, converstations about wood species and properties, and a 3D slideshow. We'll be there again (in the new John Hope Visitors' Centre) on Saturday 21st November from 1pm until 4pm.

Wood NDT conference

I attended in the 16th International Nondestructive Testing and Evaluation of Wood Symposium in Beijing this month and presented a paper about the work we have been doing in the UK using acoustic tools to study the variation in wood properties and the potential for resource segregation.

The conference also included presentations on grading and inspection of components, structures and trees and enabled SIRT to create new links with researchers working around the world on topics of interest to us. The next conference in this series will be in Sopron, Hungary 5th-7th September 2011.

UKTGC and BSI B/518

We are very pleased to have been invited onto the UK Timber Grading Committee and British Standards Committee B/518 (structual timber). This will help us keep informed of the latest developments in codes and standards related to grading and to provide input based on our research findings. We will also keep you informed through this blog. The next meetings are 4th and 5th November.