Thermal conductivity and diffusivity of wood

Summary Transient simultaneous measurements of thermal conductivity and diffusivity of Swedish wood have been performed with the plane source technique on oven-dry hardwood (birch) samples at room temperature and at 100 °C. The influences of temperature, density, porosity and anisotropy on thermal conduction were investigated. The measurements were done in longitudinal (parallel to the grain) and transverse (intermediate between radial and tangential) directions. As the temperature increased from 20 to 100 °C, the thermal conductivity of each sample increased slightly for both longitudinal and transverse directions. The effect of density and porosity on the thermal conductivity may be related to the presence of other scattering mechanisms such as voids and cell boundaries. It seems that the dominant mechanism of heat transfer across the cell lumina in these types of wood is the heat conduction through the voids. An attempt was made to explain the behaviour of the effective thermal conductivity by adopting a model based on the ratio between heat conduction in parallel and serial layers of gas, liquid, and solid phases. Received 7 May 1997