Projects

Innovative Poplar Low Density Structural Panel

I-PAN project is a 36 months project co-financed by the European 7th Framework Programme of Research and Develoment which aims at providing novel and highly environmental friendly solutions in the field of the engineered wood (EW) based boards. The woodworking industry is a very relevant sector in Europe and the engineered wood (EW) sector is substantially advanced both in terms of higher quality wooden materials and in terms of production and manufacturing and panels and plywood.

I-PAN stands for INNOVATIVE POPLAR LOW DENSITY STRUCTURAL PANEL and its main objective is the design of a breakthrough wood-made lightweight panel, adopting 50% of its volume recycled wood and for the remaining 50% poplar wood by using the upper part of the tree that is commonly underused. To this purpose, a novel manufacturing process will be designed and innovation to existing resins will be defined in order to require less energy during the drying and pressing process, minimizing VOC emission and reducing the overall cost of production.

In order to reach this goal, a consortium of 8 partners, coming from 4 different EU countries (Germany, Greece, Italy and Spain) and including 4 SMEs, 2 large industrial partners specialized in manufacturing wood-made panels and production of poplar made panels, a Research Centre and a University is involved.

Link to source code (Matlab): [GitHub]

Brochure

Web site

http://www.ipanproject.eu/


Virtual Environment for the Simulation of 3D Wood Strands

A virtual environment for the computation of synthetic three-dimensional samples of wood strands free-falling on a surface was proposed. A multiple view acquisition is also simulated in order to test the computer vision algorithms.

The method is proposed for applications of particle size measurements, in particular regarding the measurements of wood strands, in which it is very difficult to obtain the ground truth relative to the size and distribution of the strands.

Schema of the researched system

Examples of simulated acquisitions

References
  • R. Donida Labati, A. Genovese, E. Muñoz, V. Piuri, F. Scotti, "3-D granulometry using image processing", in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, pp. 1251-1264, March, 2019. ISSN: 1551-3203. [DOI: 10.1109/TII.2018.2856466][PDF]
  • R. Donida Labati, A. Genovese, E. Muñoz, V. Piuri, F. Scotti, G. Sforza, "Analyzing images in frequency domain to estimate the quality of wood particles in OSB production", in Proc. of the 2016 IEEE Int. Conf. on Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications (CIVEMSA 2016), Budapest, Hungary, pp. 1-6, June 27-29, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-4673-9759-9. [DOI: 10.1109/CIVEMSA.2016.7524251][PDF]
  • R. Donida Labati, A. Genovese, E. Muñoz, V. Piuri, F. Scotti, G. Sforza, "Improving OSB wood panel production by vision-based systems for granulometric estimation", in Proc. of the 1st Int. Forum on Research and Technologies for Society and Industry - Leveraging a better tomorrow (RTSI 2015), Turin, Italy, pp. 557-562, September 16-18, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-4673-8166-6. [DOI: 10.1109/RTSI.2015.7325157][PDF]
  • R. Donida Labati, A. Genovese, V. Piuri, F. Scotti, "A virtual environment for the simulation of 3D wood strands in multiple view systems for the particle size measurements", in Proc. of the 2013 IEEE Int. Conf. on Computational Intelligence and Virtual Environments for Measurement Systems and Applications (CIVEMSA 2013), Milan, Italy, pp. 162-167, July 15-17, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-4673-4701-3. [DOI: 10.1109/CIVEMSA.2013.6617414][PDF]