WORLDWIDE CORRELATIONS OF MECHANICAL PROPERTIES AND GREEN

WOOD DENSITY

Karl J. Niklas and all

Introduction
Firstly the author talks about the background information about

the subject, the function of the density of plant tissues is that it could

influence the hydraulic and mechanical behavior of stems and roots,

and it could also influence the ecosystem processes, and the author

gave an example about it, like the store of carbon and biomass

allocation in plant communities.

There are a lot of studies show that the density of tissues is

critical to assessing the cost of constructing plant organs, because

tissue density increases as a function of the volume fraction of cell

walls and because the bulk of cell walls is composed of carbon. (Niklas

2010)

The reasons that they did this research is because most of the

previous studies that related plant tissue density to the mechanical

properties of wood are using specimens that have been dried down to

12% moisture content. But the estimation based on the density of

dried specimens can lead to large errors when calculating the ability of

plant to cope with their own weight.

There is a big difference between our understanding of the

physical and mechanical properties of living trees, for example, the

cost of construction are restricted to carbon cost, and it ignores the

mechanical consequences of water in wood on its weight.

And then author shows us the way they use to research on this

subject. Firstly, they measure 161 species with the density of wood at

50% moisture content, and correlate these properties with the data for

four key material properties of wood. They also use allometric analysis

for exploring how these scales varies through different species.

Materials And Methods

They collected the density of wood at 50% moisture, and the four

key material properties, the first one is Youngs modulus (E), which is

the ability of resisting compression or tension for a simple or composite

material; the second one is the modulus of rupture (MR), it means the

biggest stress when fracture is in bending; the third one is the

maximum strength in shearing (SG), it is when before the material fails

in torsion, the largest stress the this material experienced; and the last

one which is the maximum strength in compression (SC), before the

material fails in a compressive force, the biggest stress that happens in

this material. These four mechanical properties can show us the ability

of plant tissue to deal with bending.

They also use the data from a forest product compendium

( Lavers, 1969 ) to study their subject. This data contains 29 conifer

species and 132 angiosperm species that were reported by a lot of

different experiments, and those data was collected over a period of

about 40 years. And there are some additional data was also collected

from their colleagues.

They talked about how they carry out the research at the

following content. They calculated the moisture content of unseasoned

wood, MC, by weighing a sample and then drying it in the temperature

of 101-105 Celsius until the sample mass become stable. Then they

collected the data of bending tests, so that they could get the Youngs

modulus and the modulus of rupture, which are E and MR. The

maximum compression strength, which is Sc, was divided the max load

by each specimens cross-section area to find out. And the last one, the

maximum shearing strength, SG, they used a 20 mm cube of sample

wood to place in pivoted-arm shear testing apparatus to determine it.

And then they applied the standard parametric test and

nonparametric test, to see if the average data from conifer trees is

different statistically. Then they use the data to form some charts, for

comparison. And they used log10-transformed data to do the ordinary

least square (OLS) and reduced major axis (RMA) regression analyses.

Results
With the exception pf moisture content, the five factors were

different from the conifer group and angiosperm species group. And

the moisture content of the woods in the conifer and angiosperm

groups could not see any big difference. However, the numerical

values of the five factors in conifers were way lower than

angiosperms, but the regression curve slope and y-intercept

heterogeneity are failed to find any difference of log-log linear

relationships for those four factors and the green wood density.

Discussion
The opinion of high density woods reduce the risk of breakage,

rotting, pathogen invasion, and xylem implosion of root and stem has

been challenged: these benefits are incidental, since the high wood

densities reduce the cost of maintenance for root and stem. They

believed that it was worthier to find out the environmental contexts

that the woods with different density and material properties prosper

or decline, rather than just simply find a canonical explanation for

why green wood density varies over an order of magnitude across

conifer and angiosperm tree species. (Niklas 2010)

Works Cited
Niklas, Karl J. "WORLDWIDE CORRELATIONS OF MECHANICAL PROPERTIES."
American Journal of Botany (2010): 1587-1594.