Stig-Inge GUSTAFSSON 1 THE STRENGTH PROPERTIES OF SWEDISH OAK

Because of their economic impact most research on wood in Sweden is aimed at our needle-leaved species, i.e. pine and spruce. Sawmills and other industrial enterprises using these conifers are also in vast majority, both in number of em-ployees and number of companies. However, there is a viable industrial branch in Sweden, i.e. furniture companies, dealing with broad-leaved species such as oak, birch, and alder. Such industries often import all the wood they use, even if the same type of wood grows in the vicinity. In order to make the Swedish broad-leaved trees more interesting to the wood manufacturing sector, we examined the strength properties of some common Swedish woods, viz. oak and beech. The result shows that our oak specimens had a modulus of elasticity of 12.243 MPa measured by using four-point bending. So-called the Young’s modulus was 11.761 MPa for tension and 15.610 MPa for compression in the fibre direction, i.e. there was a very high difference. The stress just before rupture was measured to 85 MPa for tension and 76 MPa for compression, i.e. there was a surprisingly small difference. For beech, our corresponding values were 13.017 MPa for four-point bending, the Young’s modulus during tension was 13.954 MPa and 130.4 MPa in maximum stress, whilst under compression these values were 13.101 MPa and 84 MPa, respectively