Mechanics of Materials 43 (2011) 487495

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Mechanics of Materials
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mechmat

A 3D multilevel model of damage and strength of wood: Analysis of microstructural effects

Hai Qing , Leon Mishnaevsky Jr.
Materials Research Division, Ris National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, Technical University of Denmark, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark

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A 3D hierarchical computational model of damage and strength of wood is developed. The model takes into account the four scale microstructures of wood, including the microbril reinforced structure at nanoscale, multilayered cell walls at microscale, hexagon-shapetube cellular structure at mesoscale and annual rings at the macroscale. With the use of the developed hierarchical model, the inuence of the microstructure, including microbril angle (MFA), the cell shape and the wood density (annual ring structure), differences between earlywood and latewood as well as microstructural arrangements and cellulose strength distributions on the tensile strength of wood is studied numerically. Good agreement of the theoretical results with experimental data has been obtained. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 19 July 2010 Received in revised form 2 May 2011 Available online 6 June 2011 Keywords: Wood Strength Finite element analysis Micromechanical modeling Unit cell Damage

1. Introduction The accurate prediction of strength and reliability of wood/wooden structures is signicant for use in structural applications. Further, knowledge of the microstructural sources of high strength of wood and other biomaterials mechanisms can also help people to design and improve composites and other man-made materials (Vincent, 1990; Gordon and Jeronimidis, 1980; Fratzl and Weinkamer, 2007). On the basis of the characteristic length scales, softwood can be usually described at four different structural levels (Mishnaevsky and Qing, 2008). At the macroscale, it is multilayered material containing alternating earlywood and latewood annual rings. At the mesoscale, it is a cellular material formed by hexagon-shaped-tube cells. At the microscale, the wall of cellular structure at mesoscale consists of middle lamella, primary wall and secondary wall (S1, S2 and S3), from outmost to innermost. At the nanoscale, the layers S1, S2 and S3 in secondary wall can
Corresponding author. Tel.: +45 4677 5805; fax: +45 4677 5758.
E-mail addresses: qingh07@yahoo.com (H. Qing), lemi@risoe.dtu.dk (L. Mishnaevsky Jr.). 0167-6636/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.mechmat.2011.05.007

be considered as unidirectional brereinforced composites, while middle lamella and primary wall can be considered as random short-bre/particle reinforced composites. Many micromechanical models have been developed to study the elastic properties of wood specic to the characteristic length scales (see review Mishnaevsky and Qing, 2008). Comparing with the abundant study on elastic properties of wood, the study on wood strength is very limited, and mostly focuses on experimental tests. Kartal et al. (2008) demonstrated that the wood strength decreases with the increasing of hemicellulose content in wood specimens. The experiments of Gindl and Teischinger (2003) showed that the shear strength of normal wood is lower than compression wood. Blomberg et al. (2005) demonstrated that all tested strength properties of wood increased with density. The experiments carried out by Via et al. (2009) through near infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction showed that wood strength decreases with the increasing of MFA. The experimental study of Deresse et al. (2003) showed that the wood strength increases with increasing of the wood density, and decreases with increasing of MFA. Via et al. (2003) demonstrated that the samples from mature wood have a higher slope between density and mechanical properties than those