Scotland is equipped to be at the cutting edge across a range of timber research areas, according to a leading European academic.
Speaking at a “wood micromechancs” workshop at Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute, Karin Hofstetter, of Vienna University of Technology, said Scotland’s “diverse research expertise, if combined, had huge potential” to benefit the country’s timber industry.
Addressing an audience of 40 researchers from across Scotland and further afield, Dr Hofstetter said research in wood and forest sciences was urgently needed to “maintain timber sector competitiveness and develop higher added value products”.
Dr Hofstetter herself heads the European Cooperation in Science and Technology initiative (COST), which focuses on improving the performance of wood products by understanding the material’s microscopic behaviour.
“Scotland is presented with an almost unique opportunity in having leading scientists so close geographically in practically all relevant fields; chemistry, physics, computer science, and engineering,” she said. “Combining their competences in a joint research effort has huge potential to advance the state-of-knowledge for the benefit of Scotland’s timber industries.”
The workshop was run to gauge the level of interest in wood mechanics among researchers currently working with other materials.
“There are relatively few researchers currently looking at wood properties,” said organiser Dr Dan Ridley-Ellis, senior research engineer at the Forest Products Research Institute. “However, there is a great deal of expertise in Scotland in related fields, and in techniques and approaches currently applied to solve other problems can potentially be applied to wood.”
