Specific modulus and density profile as characterization criteria of prefabricated wood composite materials

Abstract

Wood based product industry has developed and modified a wide range of products to cater changing demands of construction industry. Development of a product necessitates characterization to ensure compliance to established standards. Traditionally a product was characterized by properties like bending properties, density and swelling factor etc. Whereas, advances in technology has introduced more sophisticated parameters which represent a combination of various classical factors and provide more practical and detailed information. In this study, we procured four different types of commercial products, viz. Gypsum board, cement board, oriented strand board and gypsum fiber board and tried to characterized them using density profile ratio and stiffness ratio. We observed some interesting empirical relations between various parameters as represented in various plots.