Japanese attendee objectives for building products trade shows: A cross-national comparison

Nowadays the sawmill industry is in possession of sophisticated measurement equipment, which is the key to the successful running of the wood transformation process. New technologies such as three-dimensional (3D) scanners are becoming more and more common in Swedish sawmills. These scanners are used for sorting sawlogs according to different criteria such as diameter, length, or quality. They also perform the automatic scaling of the sawlogs that is the basis for estimating volume. Both scaling and sorting are done on bark, i.e., before debarking the logs. Specific functions for the double bark thickness are used to estimate the diameter under bark of the logs. However, these functions do not take into account the eventual missing/damaged bark from the surface ofthe logs. The errors caused by this lack of precision negatively affect the quality of both scaling and sorting procedures. In this study, with the aid of a simulation technique and field tests, questions regarding the size of these errors and how missing bark affects the measurement procedure when using a 3D log scanner are tackled. Finally, a new system for bark deduction is proposed, implemented, and evaluated in a Swedish sawmill. The results show that paying more attention to missing bark when scaling and sorting sawlogs can considerably increase the accuracy of these operations, thus leading to improvements in the forestry-wood chain.