Welcome to the special issue of the International Wood Products Journal featuring papers from the International Panel Products Symposium 2013. We are grateful to Gervais Sawyer for the invitation to continue the relationship between the conference and this journal, and to showcase some of the research presented at the event. We hope that you will find plenty of interest.
Progress in wood based panels has been steady, and there are always fresh challenges, for example, in changing feedstock from softwood to hardwood, and altering the resin composition to enhance performance, or to take account of the different wood and agri-crop species available in emerging producer regions of the globe. At the BioComposites Centre, we have worked with many of these aspects over the past 25 years, or welcomed experts from all areas to IPPS.
The IPPS conference in 2013 featured a built environment theme, and many papers related to the measurement and modelling of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), both during board pressing, and in full scale rooms for indoor air quality. This is important data to build understanding of the processes, and to show the vast improvements in performance made by the wood based panels industry over the past ten years.
The trend towards timber frame construction, natural fibre insulation products, and improved building performance are all supported by the forest products industry. As such, it is important to consider the wider environmental benefits, such as carbon storage, induced by good forest management and stewardship, and a healthy forest products sector. Quantifying these benefits is a daunting task, but we are pleased to highlight a paper which has focused on carbon sequestration in the UK context.
Once again it is our pleasure to feature a paper by one of the winning poster presentations at the event, Martin Weigl and co-authors from Holzforschung Austria. This year’s poster prize unusually saw a tie for first place, and we must also congratulate Ângela Dias from the Universidade de Porto, Portugal and co-authors for joint first place.
Dr Morwenna Spear AIMMM
Dr Graham Ormondroyd FIMMM