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The modern wood converting processes consists of several stages and material drying belongs to the most influencing future performances of products. The procedure of drying wood is usually realized between subsequent sawing operations, affecting significantly cutting conditions and general properties of material. An alternative methodology for determination of mechanical properties (fracture toughness and shear yield stress) based on cutting process analysis is presented here. Two wood species (pine and beech) representing soft and hard woods were investigated with respect to four diverse drying methods used in industry. Fracture toughness and shear yield stress were determined directly from the cutting power signal that was recorded while frame sawing. An original procedure for compensation of the wood density variation is proposed to generalize mechanical properties of wood and allow direct comparison between species and drying methods. Noticeable differences of fracture toughness and shear yield stress values were found among all drying techniques and for both species, but only for beech wood the differences were statistically significant. These observations provide a new highlight on the understanding of the effect of thermo-hydro modification of wood on mechanical performance of structures. It can be also highly useful to optimize woodworking machines by properly adjusting cutting power requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cutting force is an energetic effect of splitting material, and might be considered from a point of view of modern fracture mechanics. Forecasting of the shear plane angle in cutting broaden possibilities for modelling of the cutting process even for thin uncut chips. Such mathematical model has been developed here for description of the orthotropic materials’ cutting on the base of fracture theory, and includes work of separation (fracture toughness) in addition to the material plasticity and friction. The original methodology of simultaneous determination of the fracture toughness and the shear yield strength on the basis of wood cutting forces (or cutting power) is also presented in this paper. The set of data necessary for computation can be easily obtained while cutting wood with common rotating tools, such as a circular saw or a router bit. The results generated include both fracture toughness and shear yield stresses in the shear plane, separately for two anatomical directions of wood. The simplicity and reliability of this method provides wide range of practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]