Investigation of Factors Affecting Reliability of Fakopp 3D Acoustic Tomograph (Wood Tomograph) Device Used for Determining of Wood Defects in Forestry Industry

Abstract In today's manufacturing industry, cost, productivity and quality are three important concepts. These concepts are in a relationship with each other. To provide manufacturing quality has a positive influence on cost and productivity. Structure and quality of wood is important in forestry industry. Raw wood material having different features, such as cracks, defects, moisture content, and density, are evaluated in different industrial areas according to these structural characteristics. Therefore, the importance of non-destructive tests methods used for quality control in manufacturing is increasing day after day. In this study, several circular cross-sectional discs in different diameter (30-35 cm) were obtained by cutting down of 20 standing spruce trees. After creating some artificial defects, such as decay, fracture, cavity in those discs, some negativity which may show up in determining of those defects and accuracy rating of the device were tried to detect by applying ultrasonic tomographic technique which is one of nondestructive tests technique. In the literature, it was seen that all characteristics (growth rings, fractures, decay, knot and amount of moisture) in wood or wooden material affected ultrasonic speed of sound in a certain rate. For this reason, effects of moisture contents on ultrasonic measurement were investigated by revealing humidity of the wood via using a moisture meter. In addition, it was tried to determine the relationships between data (diameter alteration of artificial cavity discs and alteration of moisture content in the wood - alteration of ultrasonic velocity) in this study. Thus, it was aimed to contribute to accuracy and reliability of the results obtained by other studies performed by several authors by detecting factors affecting accuracy of measurements on wood and wooden material and degree of influence of those.