Creep in chipboard

Summary Samples of five chipboards, one waferboard, one plywood, one fibre building board and Scots pine timber were loaded in four point bending at a stress equivalent to 60 per cent of the short term failing stress under five combinations of temperature and relative humidity for a period of six months, or until prior failure.Irrespective of whether creep behaviour was assessed in terms of total deflection, viscous component of deflection, relative creep, creep modulus, or deflection at, or time to failure, significant differences were obtained with variations both in temperature and relative humidity. The effect of temperature, at fixed humidity, was slightly greater between 20°C and 30°C than between 10°C and 20°C, while the effect of humidity was appreciably greater between 65% and 90% rh than between 30% and 65% rh. Fitting of hyperbolic curves to the data permitted the prediction of creep behaviour with a good degree of fit at any combination of temperature and humidity within the experimental range.Differences in response to environmental conditions existed among some of the boards. Thus the ranking order of the materials was slightly different under variable humidity than it was under variable temperature. It was possible to describe these differences in terms of the variation that occurred among the materials in the relative proportion of the elastic, viscoelastic and viscous components of deflection.