A study on the moisture performance of wood determined in laboratory and field trials

The present study analyses the moisture performance of nine wood species and wood-based materials determined in various laboratory and field trials to identify the method with the highest predictive power and determine the correlation between respective measurements. The moisture performance of wood and wood-based products has been recognised (besides inherent wood resistance) as the second most important parameter contributing to wood service life in above ground applications. Therefore, it is of great commercial importance to understand this phenomenon. In-service moisture monitoring trials can be unacceptably long, but on the other hand, they provide more realistic test conditions than laboratory tests. However, experiments in laboratory conditions enable a high level of reproducibility and are much faster than in-service tests. In order to assess the correlation between various tests, Pearson product moment correlation coefficients were calculated to determine the level of the strength of the linear relationship between the in-service and laboratory trials. Within this paper, it was attempted to identify laboratory methods suitable for quantification of moisture content during outdoor exposure.