Measuring The Tensile Strain of Wood By Visible And Near-Infrared Spatially Resolved Spectroscopy

Wood has various mechanical properties, so stiffness evaluation is critical for quality management. Using conventional strain gauges constantly is high cost, also challenging to measure precious wood materials due to the use of strong adhesive. This study demonstrates the correlation between light scattering changes inside the wood cell walls and tensile strain. A multifiber-based visible-near-infrared (Vis–NIR) spatially resolved spectroscopy (SRS) system was designed to rapidly and conventiently acquire such light scattering changes. For the preliminary experiment, samples with different thicknesses were measured to evaluate the influence of thickness. The differences in Vis–NIR SRS spectral data diminish with an increase in sample thickness, which suggests that the SRS method can successfully measure the whole strain (i.e., surface and inside) of wood samples. Then, for the primary experiment, 18 wood samples with the same thickness (2 mm) were tested to construct a strain calibration model. The prediction accuracy was characterized by a determination coefficient (R2) of 0.86 with a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 297.89 με for five-fold cross-validation; for test validation, The prediction accuracy was characterized by an R2 of 0.82 and an RMSE of 345.44 με.