Drying of Eucalyptus nitens for solid wood products

Eucalyptus nitens is an introduced hardwood in Chile. The use of Eucalyptus nitens sawn boards for higher value added products such as remanufactured, furniture and structural lumber are limited by log quality because of growth-stresses defaults and drying difficulties of sawn boards, this last due to their propensity of checks, collapse and highly heterogeneous in their properties. This project aims to characterize the drying behavior of Eucalyptus nitens sawn boards, by assessing the variability of the drying properties and to optimize the drying behaviour, collapse, drying stresses, internal and surface checks during multiple-kiln drying technologies, thus as conventional-heat and radiofrequency-heat methods. A combination of convective drying at conventional temperature and radiofrequency-vacuum were performed. Then drying behavior of sawn boards, in according with the experimental values of the drying properties was obtained in this project. The main results were an assessing of drying schedules and the optimization of drying quality during wood drying by multiple-kiln drying technologies, to define drying behavior of Eucalyptus nitens sawn boards for solid wood products.