Researchers from the Department of Statistics at UBC are leading a $500,000 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada-funded project to develop improved statistical methodologies for the wood products industry.
The grant, awarded under NSERC’s Forest Sector Research and Development Initiative, will partner UBC with FPInnovations, Canada’s national forest research institute, and with researchers at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University.
In response to market demand for improved product performance and industry’s need for more flexibility in the range of products produced, initial studies will focus on monitoring the strength and quality of the lumber supply.
“Lumber is a surprisingly complex material,” says Jim Zidek, Professor Emeritus with the Department of Statistics and co-principle investigator on the project. “The large variability from one piece to another leads to some interesting statistical challenges in determining overall strength and ensuring consistent product quality. On top of that, changes in modern technology are leading to entirely new wood products whose properties also have to be assessed.”
Lumber is graded based on a number of visual characteristics, such as knot size and grain angle. These visual indicators have long been used to assign grades, for which design values are published. Design values are used to conservatively convey the strength of lumber within the specified grade.
“Engineers rely on these values to choose the appropriate type of lumber in construction,” says Zidek. “But relating them to their visual characteristics challenges existing statistical theory and leads to interesting research problems.”
But with the emergence of new products, the globalization of the lumber market and changes to forests brought on by climate change, the supply of lumber needs to be monitored. To ensure that design standards are maintained, a better understanding of the relationship between visual grading characteristics and structural properties of wood products is necessary.
The ultimate challenge lies in coming up with a system that is both effective and efficient. As changes in demand for certain grades of lumber, fire or pine beetle infestation cause variations in supply, the need for a way to monitor and maintain quality becomes more commercially relevant. New theories that model that variability will allow for more predictability across the supply chain and assist in updating lumber product standards. The program also aims at developing new methods of grouping lumber for marketing, and improved methods for assessing new wood composite products.
BC Stats’ “Guide to the BC Economy and Labour Market” values the province’s forest sector at approximately 40 percent of British Columbia’s total exports. Over half of softwood lumber produced in Canada comes from BC. And while a strengthening Canadian dollar, lower prices for forest products and implications of the softwood lumber dispute have presented serious challenges, the industry continues to make up over three percent of BC’s gross domestic product, and employs over 20,000 British Columbians.
The grant also allows for significant enhancements to an existing research program, with funding for an expanded team. Zidek and co-principal investigator Professor Will Welch are joined by Jiahua Chen, Nancy Heckman, Matias Salibian-Barrera, Carolyn Taylor, and Lang Wu from UBC; Derek Bingham, Jiguo Cao, and Boxin Tang from SFU; and Conroy Lum and Ciprian Pirvu from FPInnovations.
Graduate student training is another key focus of the NSERC support. The grant--which includes full research assistant funding for over 20 graduate student-years--will help build a highly qualified team of statistical scientists able to tackle new challenges facing the wood products industry. The increased expertise will enable industry partners to be advised in a new capacity, and better methods will be available to identify consumer needs and provide solutions in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
