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Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood

Bibliography: p. 150-160.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Boatright, Stephen William James
Other Authors: Garrett, G G
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Centre for Materials Engineering 2016
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access_status_str Open Access
author Boatright, Stephen William James
author2 Garrett, G G
author_browse Boatright, Stephen William James
Garrett, G G
author_facet Garrett, G G
Boatright, Stephen William James
author_sort Boatright, Stephen William James
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description Bibliography: p. 150-160.
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institution University of Cape Town (South Africa)
language eng
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license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2016
publishDateRange 2016
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publisher Centre for Materials Engineering
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spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/18186 Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood Boatright, Stephen William James Garrett, G G Wood Bibliography: p. 150-160. Wood is a popular constructional material; annually the world uses approximately 10⁹ tons of it, which is more than twice that of steel. It is a little surprising, therefore, that in comparison to steel, little progress has been made in research on the mechanical properties of wood. This is particularly so in the field of fracture, which has relevance not only to the structural use of timber, but also to the important processes of machining and cutting. One of the reasons for this relative lack of knowledge concerning the fracture behaviour of wood, is that wood has such good specific toughness properties that the designer has little recourse to rigorous brittle fracture criteria. In addition, attempts to relate gross mechanical properties to the micromechanical behaviour have been hampered by insufficient knowledge of the microstructure itself. However, with the advent of electron microscopy, much of the nature of this complicated cellular composite has been established, and the Materials Science approach to the assessment of the mechanical and fracture properties of wood is now possible. Wood contains many types of strength reducing defects. Checks for instance, are cracks, usually in the radial-longitudinal plane, and are caused by preferential shrinkage during seasoning. Knots, on the other hand, are far from being crack-like and involve much grain disturbance and also a loss in load bearing area. There is some attraction, therefore, in attempting to use a quantitative fracture mechanics approach to assess the strength of flawed timber, since this is a method of analysis which has been developed to deal with fracture which initiates from inherent flaws. Although, as will be reviewed in Chapter 2, this approach has been the subject of various recent studies, it is shown in subsequent chapters to have serious limitations as a practical fracture criterion for wood. This is particularly so in the most common structural situations where wood is stressed parallel to the grain, in which case failure from inherent crack-like defects, such as checks, is only of secondary importance. Nevertheless the general fracture mechanics methodology is relevant to an investigation such as this one, combining as it does a consideration of the microstructural behaviour, and its effect on the gross mechanical properties. 2016-03-23T06:58:02Z 2016-03-23T06:58:02Z 1977 Master Thesis Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18186 eng application/pdf Centre for Materials Engineering Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment University of Cape Town
spellingShingle Wood
Boatright, Stephen William James
Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood
thesis_degree_str Master's
title Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood
title_full Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood
title_fullStr Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood
title_full_unstemmed Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood
title_short Studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood
title_sort studies on the fracture and fatigue of wood
topic Wood
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18186
work_keys_str_mv AT boatrightstephenwilliamjames studiesonthefractureandfatigueofwood