Owning sustainable properties, natural wood materials with the environmental-friendly performance can offer numerous advantages at the low cost for fabrication and maintenance in many engineering fields. Recently, natural wood materials have attracted great attention for a wide range of renewability due to biodegradability and multifunctionality. However, due to the tribological phenomena during the processing and the utilization, the advanced applications of natural wood materials are still challenged. Owing to the anisotropic structure, natural wood materials exhibit non-linear characteristics in mechanic performance. So many researchers have focused on the complex relationship between the hierarchically porous structure and mechanic property. From the perspective of wood processing, the development in engineering application might benefit from the tribological research.
It has been found that the natural wood’s tribological performance have been influenced by its physical properties, chemical components and processing parameters. In terms of physical properties of wood, timber’s tribological performance have been affected by the water content of the wood, the texture direction and the roughness on wood surface. From the point of view of chemical component, both modified wood and wood extractive might improve the friction-reduction and wear-resistance. As far as the processing parameters are concerned, the sliding velocity between the friction pairs, the temperature at the friction interface and the applied loads could make an impact on timber’s tribological behavior. The positive consequence from processing parameters obviously can promote the technical level of wood industry.
Recent progress on the tribology of timber is presented in various application scenarios. The diversified timber tribology has been developed with the sustained progress of industrial technology. In the traditional wood processing, cutting technique is still important. So timber tribology is meaningful for the utilization and preservation of cutting tools. For the mortise-tenon connection in civil engineering, static friction force plays an important role to stabilize the wood construction. With the rising of intelligent household industries, timber tribology has been taken into account at the design stage. The friction wood welding technique has been exploited to connect the different wood components. Wood-plastic composites and wood ceramic have also been investigated to improve tribological performance.
Recently, diverse kind of modified wood-based materials and techniques have attracted the researcher’s attention due to their multifunction. The potential applications of high strength materials, transparent materials for light management, thermal interface materials and structural materials in engineering have been presented. The disadvantages of timber tribological research have been also concerned. The preliminary prospect on the research of timber tribology has been carried out.
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