Wood is a strategic raw material relatively abundant in Slovenia and which, along with water, is our only naturally renewable resource. Most European wood species have a non-resistant wood that begins to rot quickly. Although such processes are desirable in nature, we want to slow them down as much as possible in wood used for commercial purposes. In the past, various biocidal coatings were used for this purpose, but these are now less and less desirable due to the growing environmental awareness of Europeans. Therefore, thermal modification is increasingly used to protect wood. In this process, the wood is exposed to high temperatures under anoxic conditions, causing various chemical changes to take place in the lignified cell wall. This is reflected in lower equilibrium moisture content, better dimensional stability and increased resistance to pests.
We would like to introduce a standard method for quality control of thermally modified wood, which can also be used in case of complaints. One of the possible methods for checking the degree of thermal modification of a particular type of wood is also thermogravimetry. In this method, calibration curves based on TG measurements of standard samples that have been thermally modified at different temperatures and whose mass loss during modification is known, are established. These show the mass loss during the TG measurement as a function of the mass loss during the previous thermal modification. The shape of the TG curve is affected by many parameters, such as the mass of the sample, the heating rate, the atmosphere in which the modification takes place, and the shape of the crucible in which the sample is placed. In my diploma work, the influence of these parameters on the shape of the calibration curves used to determine the degree of thermal modification of wood was studied. We have focused on oak wood. The best parameters are those that give a calibration curve with the largest possible correlation coefficient R2 and directional coefficient k. On this basis we can determine the mass loss during thermal modification of unknown samples, of course under the same measurement conditions.
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