Measurement of surface stress in dried Norway spruce with NIR

In sawmilling, a lot of timber properties are measured online in the sorting and grading of dried timber. This may include moisture content, shape, and a host of other parameters. An important wood property that cannot be measured online is drying stresses, although it is an important parameter for many customers. Since the destructive test methods for stress determination are time consuming, no high frequency routine measurement of the internal stresses is done. In literature, there are a few examples of near infrareds (NIR) capability to detect surface stresses along the fiber direction. There is also an example of stress measurements across the grain on a Japanese wood specie during drying, however, these measurements were always done on a tangential surface. It is unknown whether NIR prediction models can predict surface tension and stress measurements across the grain of dried Norway spruce with varying characteristics, i.e. material from different logs, heart- or sapwood, different year ring orientations, etc. If the technique cannot handle the variation in material properties, such as occurs in a sawmill environment, this means that a simple NIR measurement would not be sufficient to predict the surface tension in industry. This study investigated whether surface stresses in mechanically loaded as well as dried spruce samples with varying material properties can be predicted by NIR models. The measurement data from some mechanically loaded samples showed a correlation between the predicted and actual stress values, but many other samples showed no correlation. Moreover, the data for a single sample could show a good correlation, but the prediction could be at an incorrect stress level. As for the dried samples, NIR models were good at separating the conditioned and nonconditioned samples, but had no predictive power concerning the stress level. The models used to predict the stress level in mechanically loaded samples, were also used to predict the stress in the dried samples, but there was no correlation between the measured strain and the predicted stress level. Therefore, it is concluded that there are no clear indication that NIR measurements can be used in an industrial application for predicting the surface stress level of dried Norway spruce boards