Acoustic assessment of wood quality of raw forest materials - A path to increased profitability

A remarkable effort has been made toward developing robust nondestructive evaluation (NDE) technologies capable of predicting the intrinsic wood properties of individual trees, stems, logs, and assessing the value of stands and forests. Such technologies can help foresters make efficient management decisions, grow higher quality wood, and lead to greater profitability for forest industry. The technology provides strategic information that can help make economic and environmental management decisions on treatments for individual trees and forest stands. It will also improve thinning and harvesting operations, and efficiently allocate timber resources for optimal utilization. The technology is based on the observation of hundreds of acoustic pulses resonating longitudinally in a log and provides a weighted average acoustic velocity.