Wood Bending Using Microwave Heating

This article presents a new technique of wood bending where microwave irradiation is used to heat and soften wet wood specimens. Compared to the traditional steaming procedure, this procedure offers many advantages (i) as the heating occurs inside the specimen, complete softening is obtained very quickly; (ii) temperature can be easily controlled in order to obtain the best processing conditions; (iii) the benefit will be especially big in the case of large specimens whose pretreatment may take hours with steaming; (iv) in general, the applicability of wood bending is enlarged, i.e. new wood species and specimens with lower quality can endure larger deformations with a reduced loss. In the case where drastic strain levels are required, the forming and setting operations should be done inside the microwave oven, in order to take advantage of the additional “mechano-sorptive” flexibility appearing when wood dries under load.