Comparative Study Between Theoretical and Experimental Values of Dimensional Quantities for Tropical Brazilian Wood

ABSTRACT Brazil presents many wood species that are very useful in several sectors such as civil construction and furniture industry. Rational use of wood resources depends on the wood characterizations process, that can become easier using equations involving properties of interest. Some theoretical equations found in the literature were developed for primarily softwood from the northern hemisphere, but not checked regarding of their accuracy for tropical Brazilian wood species. This paper aims to confront four theoretical equations with the dimensional stability quantities of fifteen tropical Brazilian woods and test the accuracy of them for these wood species. Results showed that experimental values present greater variability than the ones provided by the theoretical equations. Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA performed showed that one of the four equations cannot be accurately used for tropical Brazilian wood species at 5% significance level.