Ultrasonic scanning of logs

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of research on the non-destructive testing of wood byultrasonics. The main topic of the paper is how ultrasonics may be used to characterize defects in logs and how to develop a way to scan logs in sawmill production. By combining ultrasonics with artificial intelligence, defects can be characterized by a scheme of wavepattern recognition and a procedure of total information reasoning. The newly developed method seems to improve scanning efficiency. The result of defect characterization of a cross-section is found to agree with the result obtained by X-ray tomography.