Reference

Wood & construction

Engineered timber and building biology: CLT and glulam mechanics, charring, adhesives and coatings, bamboo, forestry and forest biopharma.

Wood is a structural material that keeps living after construction: it exchanges moisture with the air, creeps under load, and chars at a predictable rate. Hence the cluster’s first recurring motif — moisture as the governing variable: nearly every property, from shrinkage to fire resistance, is counted from the fibre saturation point. The second motif is interfaces: in a composite as in a glue line, load crosses a boundary between materials, and it is usually that boundary, not the bulk material, that limits.

The remaining pages look at the forest from two other sides: as a biological system with a fixed growth rate that caps harvest, and as a chemical reactor yielding resins, bark and pharmaceutical metabolites. Bamboo and algae envelopes mark where the very idea of “wood” runs out.

Start with timber construction: beam mechanics, charring and creep are treated there as physics, not as a code of rules.

  • Engineered timber as a structural material Why cross-lamination balances shrinkage anisotropy, how moisture content governs the other properties, why fire design reduces to predictable charring, and what sustained load does over decades.
  • The forest as a production system How growth curves define rotation periods, why site productivity caps the harvest, where forest carbon actually sits, and what thinning does to the self-thinning law.
  • Biocomposites and the interface problem Why stress transfer lives or dies at the fibre-matrix interface, how maleated coupling agents bridge hydrophilic fibre to hydrophobic polymer, and why moisture is the composite's slow defeat.
  • Adhesion science and the bio-glue problem Why formaldehyde crosslinked resins dominate wood bonding, what their networks cost in emissions, and where lignin, tannin, starch and protein adhesives gain and give.
  • Algae facades: photosynthesis as a building service How light attenuation dictates flat-panel geometry, why shading is sound physics while CO2 capture is a flux not a sink, and what continuous culture maintenance costs a facade.
  • Growing wood without the tree What xylem differentiation in vitro allows, why grain and ring architecture resist prescription, and why the bioreactor must buy what the forest gets free.
  • Bamboo: a grass that builds like a tube How intercalary meristems and a missing cambium dictate harvest cycles, why hollow anatomy forbids sawing and demands engineered strands, and why stored starch and mass flowering shape plantation management.
  • The chemistry trees keep for themselves What oleoresin, suberin and bark tannins do for the tree that makes them, why tapping borrows against a defence budget, and why harvest method dominates harvest volume.
  • Secondary metabolites as drugs Why plants make so little of their own medicines, how extraction fights variability for dose precision, and when synthesis wins over the plant — and when it does not.