Abstract

Wood is classified as one of the most common building materials due to its diverse nature. Casuarina is considered one of the fast-growing trees in relatively arid countries such as Egypt. This paper aims to test the mechanical properties for the most two common species of Casuarina in Egypt, which are glauca and cunninghamiana. This research mostly focused on testing these two species for compression parallel to the grain, compression perpendicular to the grain, and static bending; tension parallel to the grain, tension perpendicular to the grain and cleavage tests were only tested on glauca because cunninghamiana was excluded after the first three tests due to the high variability and inconsistency in its results. All the tests were done according to the current standards for wood. The results show that the properties of the glauca species of casuarina wood are promising because it has sufficient strength that could enable it to be used in several structural applications.

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Data Availability Statement

All data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of the scientific research fund program for their financial contribution and the continuous support of the American University in Cairo. The authors also thank the personnel in the School of Sciences and Engineering labs.

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Go to Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 31Issue 12December 2019

History

Received: Oct 25, 2018
Accepted: Jun 10, 2019
Published online: Sep 20, 2019
Published in print: Dec 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Feb 20, 2020

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Moustafa M. Hussein [email protected]
Graduate Student and Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Construction Engineering, American Univ. in Cairo, AUC Ave., New Cairo, Cairo 11835, Egypt (corresponding author). Email: [email protected]
Khaled Nassar, Ph.D., M.ASCE [email protected]
Associate Professor, Dept. of Construction Engineering, American Univ. in Cairo, AUC Ave., New Cairo, Cairo 11835, Egypt. Email: [email protected]
Lecturer, Dept. of Construction and Building Engineering, Alahram Canadian Univ., 4th Industrial Zone, 6th of October City, Giza 12566, Egypt; Adjunct Faculty, Dept. of Construction Engineering, American Univ. in Cairo, AUC Ave., New Cairo, Cairo 11835, Egypt. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1372-6922. Email: [email protected]

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