The chemistry of wood

This video is all about the chemistry of wood - and contains a lot of cutting edge science. The structures in wood that help determine its properties are tiny - it its only recently that technology has developed to the point were we can measure them and work out what they do. The work means chemists, engineers and foresters working together. This video is also available on the firrs DVD.



Here's another short wood science video that mentions cellulose and lignin - this one is from the History Channel.

Anaglyph for 3D video

Anaglyph is the technical name for a technique of making images that have a stereoscopic 3D effect - so rather than appearing flat like a picture they appear to have depth like objects in the real world.

The anaglyph technique uses glasses with coloured filters to make it so that each eye sees a slightly different view. You can read up on how they work and how to make them yourself on Wikipedia. It's actually quite easy with modern technology, but the technique is quite an old one.

There are applications outside entertainment, and anaglyphs can be used help visualisation in science and design. Examples include viewing microscope images and models of chemicals. You can see some anaglyph photographs in the 3D gallery on the firrs webpage.

This video is mainly a bit of fun, but it shows how the anaglyph technique can be used in moving images. You can watch a much higher quality version here.

Wood shrinkage

This is a delightfully retro video looking at the microstructure of pine wood and why it shrinks when it dries. It gets quite complicated with the terminology but has good visuals that help show how things work even if you don't understand the words. The things that look like air bubbles are meant to represent water droplets.

You might also want to look at our video about the chemistry of wood (on the firrs webpage).

Wood colour and chemistry

Here's a fun little video from the WoodWhisperer talking about how the colour of wood can change over time. This is all down to chemistry and something called oxidation. That's the same process that turns a sliced apple brown.

Sapwood is the outer part of the tree trunk - the wood that the tree is using to transport sap. The heartwood is the inner part of the tree trunk - the part of the wood that the tree uses to store waste chemicals...the extractives mentioned in this video.

As a tree ages the inner part of the sapwood slowly turns into heartwood. Heartwood provides structural support to the tree, but not much else and with very old trees it is common for the heartwood to be decayed away.

Different species of tree produce different extractive chemicals which explains why they can have such different colours.