“ Wood is a traditional building material, as popular today as ever. Because wood is anisotropic, natural wooden beams work better as vertical posts( where they are in compression) than horizontal beams( where they are in tension)”.
HOW STRONG THE WOOD IS?
Physically, wood is strong and stiff but, compared to a material like steel, it’ s also light and flexible. It has another interesting property too. Metals, plastics, and ceramics tend to have a fairly uniform inner structure and that makes them isotropic: they behave exactly the same way in all directions. Wood is different due to its annual-ring-and-grain structure. You can usually bend and snap a small, dead, tree branch with your bare hands, but you’ ll find it almost impossible to stretch or compress the same branch if you try pulling or pushing it in the opposite direction. The same holds when you’ re cutting wood. If you’ ve ever chopped wood with an ax, you’ ll know it splits really easily if you slice with the blade along the grain, but it’ s much harder to chop the opposite way( through the grain). We say wood is anisotropic, which means a lump of wood has different properties in different directions.
WHAT WOOD LIKE?
The inner structure of a tree makes wood what it is— what it looks like, how it behaves, and what we can use it for. There are actually hundreds of different species of trees, so making generalizations about something called“ wood” isn’ t always that helpful: balsa wood is different from oak, which isn’ t quite the same as hazel, which is different again from walnut. Having said that, different types of wood have more in common with one another than with, say, metals, ceramics, and plastics.
3. wood architecture