Study of the Mechanical Properties of Wood under Transverse Compression Using Monto Carlo Simulation-Based Stochastic FE Analysis

Abstract

Wood is an anisotropic material, the mechanical properties of which are strongly influenced by its microstructure. In wood, grain compression strength and modulus are the weakest perpendicular to the grain compared to other grain directions. FE (finite element) models have been developed to investigate the mechanical properties of wood under transverse compression. However, almost all existing models were deterministic. Thus, the variations of geometry of the cellular structure were not considered, and the statistical characteristic of the mechanical property was not involved. This study aimed to develop an approach to investigate the compression property of wood in a statistical sense by considering the irregular geometry of wood cells. First, the mechanical properties of wood under radial perpendicular to grain compression was experimentally investigated, then the statistical characteristic of cell geometry was extracted from test data. Finally, the mechanical property of wood was investigated using the finite element method in combination with the Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) techniques using randomly generated FE models. By parameter sensitivity analysis, it was found that the occurrence of the yield points was caused by the bending or buckling of the earlywood axial tracheid cell wall in the tangential direction. The MCS-based stochastic FE analysis was revealed as an interesting approach for assessing the micro-mechanical performance of wood and in assisting in understanding the mechanical behavior of wood based on its hierarchical structure.