In May 2010 the Centre for Timber Engineering (CTE) at Edinburgh Napier University metamorphosed into a new UK national resource – the Forest Products Research Institute (FPRI). One of nine research facilities within the University, FPRI itself contains three additional research centres – Plant Science and Biopolymer research, Wood Science Technology and the Wood Studio. The latter centre is focused on innovation in the use of timber in architecture and construction to complement the existing emphasis within CTE on training engineers to design with timber, whilst the former two provide the essential scientific research skills and experience to open up brand new timber-based technologies.
The creation of FPRI was no sudden thing – from its foundation in January 2003, the CTE found itself responding to all sorts of enquiries about timber – so much so that the range of research projects it became involved in embraced such extremes as the redesign of whisky barrels and the production of home-grown timber shavings for horse bedding, as well as more conventional tasks such as the optimisation of sawmill equipment. In addition to these wide-ranging tasks, the Strategic Integrated Research in Timber (SIRT) project provided the foundation for understanding the properties of the UK forest resource and thereby the basis for further work on what the best uses for it can be.
One such possibility is my own area of research into the extraction of crystalline cellulose from wood and other plant material, of which more later, but what had become abundantly apparent was that the transformation from an engineering-centric facility to the multi-disciplinary institute we are today was not clear to the outside world, nor indeed to many of our industry partners who had contributed financially to our growth and ongoing successes. We have now built up the expertise of the institute to address a broad spectrum of the forestry and forest product sectors’ future R&D needs.
Use of UK-grown timber
Looking to the future, what is it we believe we can offer? CTE has retained its founding focus to build capacity within the civil and structural engineering sectors through education, research and knowledge transfer and, through this triangle of activity, to develop high-value engineering and construction applications for timber. A central theme of its research activity has been the use of lower-grade UK-grown timber in highly-efficient structural systems, one area of which has been the development of stress-laminated timber arches to form bridges and other structures. Initiated in 2002 in collaboration with Forestry Civil Engineering, this method has been used for more than 50 permanent bridges throughout the UK. The transition to other types of structures is moving apace, with the first building to use this technology being the recently completed starting hut for the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup at Fort William.
Lamination techniques are central to the work of the Wood Studio too, and one of the projects likely to impact most on the UK’s forestry and timber sectors is its research into the commercial manufacture of cross-laminated timber from UK-grown material. The 18-month programme currently under way has made significant early strides, not the least of which was the recent purchase of the press necessary to make panels here. Grading of material is ongoing and the first completed panels should be available for testing in August. The construction and environmental benefits of cross-laminated timber are too many to list here, but manufacturing the product in the UK from home-grown timber will add icing to this high added-value cake.
Properties and performance
Our Centre for Wood Science and Technology is focused on understanding the material properties of wood and how these affect its performance in different applications.
Its research extends from exploring the cell wall to ways of improving the performance of sawn timber and the fascinating and continually advancing world of timber modification. It provides the link between FPRI’s fundamental cell wall research and timber engineering activities.
Which leads me back to the part of our work that is perhaps least timber-like in its final form but which makes new use of the crystalline cellulose that forms the skeletal structure of woody plant material to create high added-value products. These structures have strength-to-weight ratios higher than Kevlar, but one of the biggest challenges has been to extract these nano-metre scale structures and recombine them into macro-scale products that utilise the strength inherent in the raw materials. Although there are now several chemical and mechanical techniques for the extraction of cellulose, the development of new, high-strength materials from this natural resource is still in its infancy. The prize, however, could be a whole new platform for the manufacture of high-value materials based on Europe’s most abundant, sustainable resource: its forests.
