Wood based composites - why wood composites

[0:09]So why wood composites? Lots of reasons. Uh, wood is not an anisotropic material, and if we want to make things like structural elements or furniture or walls or anything really, um, the predictability of performance of behavior, we like it to be as isotropic as possible. It just makes life simpler. You can design for the anisotropy of wood and that's where the skill comes in. But if you make a composite, you can make it much more even. You can distribute the way that loads are, um, where the forces are distributed in a sample, in, um, an element by designing a certain type of structure to that element. Or you could break the wood up, take all the knots out, glue the wood together again. So you've taken out a lot of defects. So that's another reason why you would do this. Um, you get more efficient utilization of course. So you can use bits of wood that you wouldn't normally be using for, um, the products. So you can use more juvenile wood or you can use branches. You can use the bits that maybe after you've sawn the timber, you've got chips left over, you can use those chips in composites. So you get a much more effective and useful, much higher utilization rate from the wood itself. And as, as we move on into the future, there's going to be higher and higher demands for wood products in the built environment for all the positive environmental reasons that have been discussed elsewhere, but that's going to put more pressure on the wood resource. And we can only harvest as much as the allowable cut will allow us to, um, so we have to use the the material more efficiently, more effectively. We can also do this thing called cascading. A lot of talk about cascading in terms of what's called the circular economy, circular economy. And cascading is basically taking uh, wooden materials from their first life, breaking them up into other materials for a second, third, maybe even fourth life. So you cascade down through what's called the value chain and generally speaking, you can't reuse wooden elements, structural elements again. You have to break them up into something smaller. So those things that are smaller would be the composites themselves. Uh, we can also design the wood composites in such a way that we can limit, um, dimensional changes, or we can design the composites so that the dimensional changes are more predictable. So that we deliberately engineer the material, so that we have predictable, predictable, dimensional changes. So that we orient the grain in certain ways, or we might want to have more predictable mechanical performance. So again, we would orient the grain in the layers of a composite in order to resist forces in certain directions. So these are just some of the reasons.