A method for experimental investigation of the wood chipping process

SUMMARY: To be able to formulate criteria’s for determining the onset of the creation of a wood chip; it is desirable to be able to study the deformation fields in a vicinity of the edge of the chipping tool. To that end, an experimental setup has been developed in which the chipping can be performed under very well defined conditions. In this setup it is possible to control the rate of indentation of the chipping tool and also to measure the force on the tool. The setup admits also that the angle of the wood specimen with respect to the cutting plane can be varied in both a horizontal and a vertical plane. To determine the deformations, a Digital Speckle Photography (DSP) equipment is used, which together with image processing software makes it possible to determine the strain field on the surface of the wood specimen. One observation that can be made in these studies is that prior to the creation of a chip, there is a localization of strains in a thin region starting from the edge of the tool and directed parallel to the grain. Another observation made during the experimental work is that there exist different types of fracture processes, each giving different chip thicknesses.