“Before I went into wood science, I worked with steel and aluminium components in the automotive industry. But metals are boring compared with living materials. Wood has character; no two logs are alike.
I work with computed tomography (CT) scanning to study the mechanical properties of wood so that we can locate regions of high quality material and use each tree to its full potential. Sawmills that can afford CT scanners usually check logs to avoid certain knot patterns, but my goal is to be able to predict the features of timber beyond just the knots.
In our laboratory in Skellefteå, Sweden, I use a machine that looks like a hospital scanner. It’s actually a Microtec Mito — an industrial CT machine optimized for logs — which has much higher radiation levels than hospital scanners do. This model has been used to scan apples in the food industry, but isn’t yet used in sawmills. It has an X-ray tube and a detector that rotate around a ring structure, inside which we strap our samples. Instead of scanning a patient (or an apple), we’re scanning six-metre-long logs or tiny wood samples just a few centimetres in size. The resolution we’re using is 0.3 millimetres cubed; it’s like being a surgeon.
