Mechanical Properties of Egyptian Casuarina Wood
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 31, Issue 12
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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©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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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