The Performance of Wood Decking after Five Years of Exposure: Verification of the Combined Effect of Wetting Ability and Durability

Abstract

Wood is one of the most important construction materials, and its use in building applications has increased in recent decades. In order to enable even more extensive and reliable use of wood, we need to understand the factors affecting wood’s service life. A new concept for characterizing the durability of wood-based materials and for predicting the service life of wood has recently been proposed, based on material-inherent protective properties, moisture performance, and the climate- and design-induced exposure dose of wooden structures. This approach was validated on the decking of a model house in Ljubljana that was constructed in October 2013. The decay and moisture content of decking elements were regularly monitored. In addition, the resistance dose DRd, as the product of the critical dose Dcrit, and two factors taking into account the wetting ability of wood (kwa) and its inherent durability (kinh), were determined in the laboratory. DRd correlated well with the decay rates of the decking of the model house. Furthermore, the positive effect of thermal modification and water-repellent treatments on the outdoor performance of the examined materials was evident, as well as the synergistic effects between moisture performance and inherent durability.

Application of Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Techniques to Moisture Content Data from Wood Constructions

“…Regarding wood constructions specifically, some works have documented the use of monitoring systems, mainly as a means to assess wood performance [28][29][30][31]. Generally, all these works focused on obtaining the data and carrying out diverse analysis afterward, such as decay modeling or correlation analysis.…”

“…Even though daily averaged data were employed in previous works [30], mainly because they were needed in order to compute some values, such as the daily exposure dose received by wood samples, we do not see any advantage in using these in this case. Working with daily averaged data would simply make us lose temporal resolution.…”

Durability and Mechanical Performance of Differently Treated Glulam Beams during Two Years of Outdoor Exposure

“…Some of the composites, like glulams, are used in rather exposed conditions, like bridges (Niklewski et al, 2018). Wood, as well as wood composites in outdoor applications, are exposed to biological degradation and weathering (Humar et al, 2019). The positive aspect of biological decomposability of waste wood can turn into the opposite when the wood is used in moist conditions and exposed to various discolouring and degrading organisms (Despot, 1998).…”

Modifications of Physical and Mechanical Characteristics Induced by Heat Treatment: Case Study on Ayous Wood (Triplochiton scleroxylon K. Schum)

“…Important use of ayous wood is for realizing outdoor covering of the buildings, especially in northern and central Europe. Outdoor uses expose wood to the main degradation agents such as UV, moisture and biological attacks [4,5]; and ayous wood is a low durable wood. To improve the durability of material preservatives are generally needed, which can limit the effects caused by wood degradation agents.…”