Non-destructive sensing of tree trunk internal structures and wood properties using microwave radar Imaging and full-wave inversion
(2014) PhD Day ENVITAM — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgique) (5.March.2014)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Forests cover about 30% of the Earth’s total land area and ensure essential functions such as providing habitat to 80% of the world’s biodiversity, preventing soil erosion, sequestering carbon within its global cycle, and ensuring vital needs for populations who rely on trees to build houses, make furniture and paper, and produce energy. As a result of a growing population, increasing pressures and threats have been placed on forests, which have been largely depleted by logging and conversion to agriculture. Detecting defects and deteriorations in trees and quantifying the quality of its wood for a particular application are therefore of paramount importance for optimal and sustainable forest management. Knowledge of eventual trunk deterioration also permits preventing tree collapses and is thereby important to assure people’s security, such as, e.g., in public forests or populated areas. In sawmills, due to recent European laws forcing the producers to certify the quality of the construction wood, there are new needs for a quick and cheap way to detects defects (especially knots) in wood logs and characterize wood mechanical properties. Some techniques already exist but are really expensive and not suited for practical applications. The main objective of my PhD research (project SENSWOOD, FRIA/FNRS) is to develop a novel methodology for non-invasive imaging and characterization of standing tree trunks and logs properties based on advanced microwave radar full-wave inverse modeling, thereby providing a rapid monitoring way to detect hidden decays or defects and quantitatively estimate key wood physical properties such as moisture, mechanical resistance or species-related dielectric signature (e.g., for wood origin traceability). The originality of the project lies in the application and adaptation of a new near-field radar electromagnetic model using intrinsic transfer functions characterizing the global reflection and transmission coefficients of the antenna, which has recently shown unprecedented efficiency and accuracy for determining soil and material properties. SENSWOOD entails four major challenges: (1) to provide high-resolution and high-quality microwave radar images of tree trunk sections, (2) to adapt the near-field electromagnetic model to tree structures for quantitative reconstructions to localize and quantify the extent of defects and deteriorations, (3) to derive new relationships between wood electromagnetic properties and physical properties of interest and (4), to validate the developed approaches for actual key cases. This will be realized through numerical, controlled laboratory, and field experiments. SENSWOOD should result in a new operational method for non-destructive three trunk characterization, thereby allowing scientists to observe information that was not available before and providing the concerned actors with a new tool for improved forest management.
- Affiliations
Citations
Mertens, L., & Lambot, S. (2014). Non-destructive sensing of tree trunk internal structures and wood properties using microwave radar Imaging and full-wave inversion. In Lambot Sébastien (ed.), Proceedings (p. p. 34). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/34981