• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.67-72
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• 2015

A series of fire tests was conducted to examine the fire characteristics of flaming and smoldering combustion of engineered wood products, which have been widely used for furniture and finishing materials in buildings. The engineered wood products of MDF, plywood, and chipboard were ignited by a radiant cone heater with incident heat flux of $50kW/m^2$. During the fire test, key parameters representing the fire characteristics such as the heat release rate, yield rate of combustion product, and effective heat of combustion were quantified in terms of thickness. The tests show two peak points of HRRPUA due to lateral fire propagation in the initial stage, followed by later fire penetration through the specimen thickness. The mass loss rate of flaming combustion was 5 times higher than that of smoldering combustion, while the CO yield rate of smoldering combustion was 10 times higher than that of flaming combustion. This study can contribute to the understanding of fire behavior of wood combustibles and provide useful data for fire analysis.

• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.89-99
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• 2009

Oriented Strand Board (OSB) is an important engineered wood product used in housing construction which has a lower environmental impact or "carbon footprint." In this paper, reliability and statistical tools are applied to gain insights on the strand thickness of OSB panels. An OSB panel consists of several hundred wood strands that are resinated and pressed. The variability of OSB strand thickness for six manufacturers in the Eastern United States is examined as a whole, as well as individually. Little research exists on OSB strand thickness across mills even though strand thickness variability has been documented in laboratory experiments to greatly influence the dimensional stability of OSB panels. Our aims are to quantify and characterize strand thickness, plus apply reliability techniques, such as Kaplan-Meier curves, to characterize the probability of strand thickness. We further explore graphically and statistically the thickness of the strands.

• International Journal of Reliability and Applications
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.177-186
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• 2006

Typical confidence intervals for a mean or mean residual life (MRL) are centered about the mean or mean residual life. We discuss novel confidence intervals that produce statements like "we are 95% confident that the MRL function, e(t), is greater than a prespecified $\mu_o$ for all t in the interval [0, $\hat{\theta})$)" where $\hat{\theta}$ is determined from the sample data, confidence level, and $\mu_o$. Also, we can have statements like 'we are 95% confident that the MRL of population 1, namely $e_1$(t), is greater than the MRL of population 2, $e_2$(t), for all t in the interval [0, $\hat{\theta}$)" where $\hat{\theta}$ is determined from the sample data and confidence level. We illustrate these one and two sample confidence intervals on internal bonds (tensile strengths) for an important modem engineered wood product, called medium density fiberboard (MDF), used internationally.