Wood is an incredibly important material, it has been used in building construction, furniture making, for fuel, and in many other applications throughout history. Today, wood is still seen as a viable, renewable source for many of our construction needs. Understanding the thermal properties of wood is necessary to model thermal transport in buildings constructed with wood, and is crucial to predicting how wood will burn as a fuel. Since wood is a highly anisotropic material, the Hot Disk TPS is an ideal instrument to test the thermal conductivity as it has an anisotropic testing module for this very purpose. The application pages linked below are excellent examples of how the Hot Disk TPS has been used to study the thermal properties of both oven-dried and green wood, and provide an idea of the variety of projects the equipment can be applied to when it comes to timber products. 

Thermal Conductivity Testing of Wood with the Hot Disk TPS: Application on Oven-dried Samples

In this page, we discuss a paper in which six samples of oven-dried birch are tested to determine the effects of anisotropy, density, and porosity on thermal conductivity. Read more here.