In the early 2000s, investment was made in SilviScan, a system capable of anatomical characterisation (Figure 1) and high resolution density and microfibril measurements from pith to bark on samples from pulleys and 10 mm diameter cores. This installation is one of only three such measurement systems in the world. Complementing the measurement system, there were also sample preparation tools that can prepare samples of appropriate size and surface quality with high precision. The system in Stockholm has since been an important tool in tree breeding and research projects investigating the effect of genetics and environment on wood properties.

Figure 1: SilviScan performs, among other things, anatomical
analyses. While research on forest resources has traditionally focused on wood properties important for pulp and timber products, in recent years there has been increased interest in other bioproducts where the chemical composition is more important than the physical.

Consequently, it also invested in a near-infrared (NIR) camera for chemical characterisation of both pulleys and drill cores. This particular combination of the NIR camera with SilviScan makes the laboratory unique in its ability to characterise wood samples in their chemical and physical properties.

At the same time, the number of greenhouse experiments on hybrid aspen, which is often used as a model tree in scientific studies, increased in order to quickly investigate genetic and environmental effects on wood and tree characteristics. In these greenhouse studies, new wood samples are generated in just three months, but the laboratory was more equipped for the analysis of pulleys and 10 mm drill cores from adult trees. Consequently, the development of a sample preparation routine for greenhouse samples was initiated that includes NIR scanning of trunk cross-sections followed by sawing and scanning with SilviScan. Thus, the laboratory is now able to generate high-resolution chemical and physical information on greenhouse samples that are also generated at a high rate.

In a further step towards wood characterisation of younger trees - this time ca. 8-12 year old spruce field trials - sample preparation and scanning procedures were recently developed for the analysis of 5 mm diameter cores taken just above the ground, instead of at breast height. In contrast to analyses on older trees, this means that only juvenile wood is analysed, which is often regarded as the very part of the tree where wood quality needs to be improved. Here too, the ability to characterise younger trees means that the rate of refinement can be increased.

But the laboratory is not only active in tree breeding. NIR technology is applicable in industrial processes, and the NIR camera can be used to create models for the prediction of physical and chemical properties. Examples of such properties include tree species, core/splinter, rot, moisture, lignin, cellulose, resin, minerals, etc. Examples of ongoing projects include the characterisation of wood chips for pulp production, timber in consideration measurement and identification of undesirable properties in furniture components.

In addition, the laboratory is also involved in product and process development projects, such as the evaluation of the results of impregnating wood with the NIR camera. Clearly, there are opportunities for the laboratory to contribute in more areas. It is the imagination that sets the limits for the laboratory's use. The challenge, however, is that potential customers are aware of their problems and how the laboratory's offer can contribute.

Further reading
High-resolution wood characterisation in laboratory environment

This is an article from our magazine Trävärden, view it here! (Link)

By 2030, EU emissions will have been reduced by at least 55%. EU agriculture ministers have recognised that the bioeconomy has clear potential to be part of the solution to the climate crisis and dependence on fossil fuels. It could also play an important role in strengthening food security, an issue that has become highly topical in the context of global uncertainty.

"A lot needs to happen in the coming years," says Caroline Ankerfors, head of RISE's Bioeconomy research programme. And within the research programme, participating companies have the opportunity to make a difference while strengthening their own competitiveness by working together to find ways to benefit from the latest research.

"The key word is 'together'. When companies from different parts of the value chain come together around common challenges, everyone gets the full picture. If you have ten companies in a joint project, you are ten times more likely to achieve something," says Caroline Ankerfors.

As part of the research programme, RISE is working with companies to find new solutions in areas such as climate-friendly materials and new processes. Reducing the use of fossil-based additives is also on the agenda. Partners range from forestry companies, pulp mills and paper producers to food, cosmetics and door manufacturers.

Combination of breadth and focus for climate benefits

At the end of 2024, RISE launched another extensive research programme and more projects may be added. The aim is to fill the programme with actors who have green transition and climate benefits as important driving forces. Many of the companies that participated in previous research programmes are already involved in the new round.

"The companies are very active and generous with their experience. This is crucial to ensure that the projects launched are relevant and lead to something concrete. The idea is that the knowledge gained by the companies is put to use, either with our help or by the companies themselves using the new knowledge to improve their products and processes and thereby strengthen their competitiveness," says Caroline Ankerfors. 

Green transition is the common thread

The approach is for the partner companies to form consortia and work together on various projects. Examples include developing fibres for better paper performance or improving wood recycling processes.

"The common thread throughout the Bioeconomy Research Programme is green transition, becoming bio-based in areas where we may not be today. It is about making the best use of our raw materials and being resource efficient in everything from food production to pulp production and forestry. We are approaching the same question and challenge from different angles."

How does it work to get industry colleagues, and in some cases competitors, in the same room with common goals?

"The project structure of the programme is such that in the basic projects we do not work with application development, but the companies are involved in what is called pre-competitive research. This is where it is safe to be competitors in the same room. We also have agreements that protect both the results and the information provided by the participants," says Caroline Ankerfors.

Who decides what the projects are about?

"The projects have been developed by RISE in close dialogue with the participating companies, who have also been given the opportunity to provide input. It is of course important that the project content is of value to all participating companies, but this is not usually a problem. Not everyone may be super interested in 100 per cent of the content, but perhaps 75 per cent."

In the example of ten companies carrying out a joint research project, the participants get a tenfold return on their research money, access to each other's knowledge - and to RISE's brains and labs.

"If you have the capacity and interest to manage the knowledge, it is very valuable," says Caroline Ankerfors.

The environmental impact of the built environment and the construction industry is huge due to the extensive use of energy and resources. To change this, the transition to a circular economy is one of the key approaches to sustainable development and the solution to its environmental impact. A newly launched project DUET - Circular Design and Use of Wood Building Elements will increase the resource efficiency of wood use by studying the technical feasibility of using recycled wood and/or industrial wood waste together with new wood to produce new building elements for load-bearing walls and floors.

Using both recycled materials and/or residues can facilitate the manufacturing and market acceptance of the new products. The project studies both technical and environmental feasibility, but also the possibility of circular use of the new building elements. A future circular use means that the building elements will be easier to dismantle and reuse as elements or in parts for recycling of the sub-materials. This increases the lifetime of the building elements and helps to significantly extend the time of carbon storage and thus the strategies and targets for net zero emissions in society.

The development work with regard to material flows is done in co-operation with Forestia and Gällö Timber AB. The circular use of wall and floor elements is developed in collaboration with IsoTimber Holding AB and Masonite Beams AB. In the project, prototypes for wall and floor elements will be built and tested to verify that the technical and mechanical requirements for building products are met.

This is an article from our magazine Trävärden, view it here! (Link)

In 2020, the country's 4333 wind turbines produced 16% of our energy in Sweden (Energi myndigheten 2020, Ny statistik över installerad vindkraft 2020 (energimyndigheten.se). That's a lot of power plants and more are expected in the coming years. They produce renewable energy, but also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. In general, today's wind turbines are built with materials such as steel and concrete. Strong materials that can withstand the forces a wind turbine is subjected to, but the traditional choice of materials contributes to high greenhouse gas emissions. The largest contributor to the climate impact of wind power comes from the raw materials used in the manufacture of the turbines.

The wind power industry has a need to reduce the climate impact when manufacturing new power plants. The Gothenburg-based company Modvion is helping to reduce the climate impact of the wind power industry by replacing the tower, which is usually made of steel, with a wooden tower of the same height. In 2020, the first 30-metre-high wooden wind power tower was erected on Björkö in the Gothenburg archipelago. Another tower was recently erected in Skara, reaching 105 metres. Subsequently, even higher towers are planned to support turbines with even greater production capacity.

Advantages of wooden wind towers
Wood is a renewable material that also sequesters carbon over the life of the wind turbine. Steel is strong - stronger than wood - but it is also heavy. When comparing the strength of materials in relation to their weight, wood outperforms steel. In increasingly tall towers, the weight of the tower means that the steel tower needs to be reinforced to support its own weight. Wooden towers, which are lighter, do not have the same problem with their own weight and so it is possible to build tall and slender with wood. To cope with the extreme forces of the massive rotor blades at the top of the tower and the strong winds to which a wind turbine is exposed, Modvion has developed and now manufactures wooden frames for wind towers. The construction consists of thin wood laminates that are glued and pressed together into curved 15 metre long wooden modules. The modules are erected, joined and then stacked on top of each other to erect the tower. The relatively small size of the modules allows them to be transported to the construction site by smaller lorries compared to today's steel towers where specialised vehicles are used to transport larger components.

Development work
One challenge has been to develop strong joints for joining the modules that can be efficiently assembled on site and withstand the extreme forces on the tower. The solution used is inspired by a relatively new technique where a steel plate with holes is glued between the wooden elements to be joined. This differs from traditional jointing solutions where steel plates are used in combination with, for example, screws, bolts or dowels. Using glue instead of metal connectors results in very strong and rigid joints. The manufacture of glued wood structures is usually done in a factory in a controlled environment and under controlled conditions. On the construction site, temperature, humidity and working conditions vary and thus it can be difficult to control the quality of the gluing. In the project Stuck in the middle with you (SIMWY), funded by Vinnova, Modvion, Henkel and RISE are collaborating to develop Modvion's method for construction gluing on the construction site. You can read more about the project on the project website, (Link).

Developing new technology means that it needs to be tested and evaluated. RISE has experts in various subject areas and laboratories for testing and evaluating materials and structures, both on a small and large scale. Together with Modvion, RISE has tested the the new hybrid joint for different types of loads that mimic those it needs to withstand in reality in a completed wind turbine tower. The joint has also been subjected to fatigue through cyclic tests where it has been loaded and unloaded thousands of times over a long period of time to failure. Fatigue is rarely relevant in ordinary wooden buildings, but in structures such as bridges and nowadays tall towers that are loaded with high varying loads during their lifetime, the phenomenon becomes relevant. 

This is an article from our magazine Trävärden, it is available in full here! (Link)

We face a major need for renovation, especially of buildings constructed between the 1950s and 1990s. From a societal perspective, it is important to improve the building stock by extending its lifespan and updating it to current energy requirements. In renovations, additional insulation is a common measure that often negatively affects the aesthetic appearance of the façade. This means an operational gain but often a loss of the original design. In a previous project Fasaden i Staden, Snabb, Snygg, Smart (financed via BioInnovation), led by RISE Träbyggande, an innovative wooden façade system was developed for new construction in the urban environment.

Through the project "E2B2 Climate-smart renovation with innovative wooden facade (funded by the Swedish Energy Agency), it is possible to save energy by continuing to develop and adapt the facade system to the renovation of million program buildings.

-In addition, the facade system will be designed with a focus on an adaptable and digitalized design process, and the components will be possible to dismantle in the future, says project manager Karin Sandberg, RISE. 

The façade system should also be designed so that it can be manufactured in the factory and then easily assembled on the construction site.

-Case studies will be used to verify how well the façade system is designed for manufacturing, LCA energy optimization, digital management of information and variation in design possibilities for the architect. The result will be presented in a digital platform model, says Camilla Schlyter, RISE, who works as the institute's doctoral student on the issue.

The aim of the project is to ensure that the entire chain from design to production works in practice. Prototypes are being manufactured by the project partners Hedlunda Industrier and SCA with Kiruna Bostäder's renovation of Lombolo in mind, and Equator Arkitekter is contributing design expertise.

-We see an increased demand for facade systems that are climate neutral and optimized for low material and energy consumption, and provide the opportunity for aesthetic freedom and variation for architects, developers and managers, says Camilla Schlyter.

-The project contributes to the development of attractive bio-based facades central to the transition of the civil engineering industry towards a reduced fossil dependence, concludes Karin Sandberg.

This is an article from our magazine Trävärden, view it here! (Link)

The Swedish sawmill industry is very dependent on spruce and pine, so RISE has now produced documentation showing how two "new" types of wood could be used in structural applications. The wood species are birch, which is Sweden's third most common wood species, and contorta pine, which is the third most common coniferous species. Neither contorta pine nor birch has been able to be graded and CE marked for structural timber in Sweden or Europe1 before. Using more wood species could broaden the raw material base for structural timber and potentially provide higher strength classes than today. Two recent projects, BizWOOD Småland2 and Konstruktionsvirke - Contorta3 have investigated the possibility of strength grading of birch and contorta pine.

Birch as a sawn product is used in the furniture industry, but the use is currently small and is about 50,000 m3fub4. The birch, which actually consists of two sawn wood species, spring birch (Betula pendula) and glass birch (Betula pubesens), has been tested by RISE through a part of the BizWOOD Småland project. The studies show that birch has a significantly higher strength, stiffness and density than our normally used softwood species. In addition, it shows that it would be possible to sort birch with the same approach as conifers both visually and mechanically. The sorting could provide a high yield and sort out high strength classes, in classes up to C45 for construction timber.

Continuation follows and the results from the project will be co-published together with Norwegian results from tests made at RISE for NIBIO, the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy. A report will also be presented to CEN/ WG123/TG1, which forms the basis for an AGR (Approves Grading Report) which is an approval for grading for Norwegian and Swedish birch. When the report is published, it will be possible to grade structural timber from birch.

The contorta pine is Sweden's third most common coniferous tree species and originates from North America, where it can be found all the way from California in the south to Alaska in the north. In this vast natural range, it exists as several subspecies. The Swedish contorta originates in the inner parts of central British Columbia in Canada. Today, we speak of contorta, contorta pine or twisted pine. In its natural habitat in Canada it goes by the names. Lodgepole pine and Shore pine. Contorta pine grows quickly in the right soils in the Swedish climate, with up to 40% better volume growth than our native pine.

In the project Konstruktionsvirke - Contorta, machine manufacturers of sorting machines were given the opportunity to carry out measurements in their own machines on collected sample material. In combination with fracture tests conducted at RISE, setting values were calculated for the sorting machines. At present, one machine manufacturer has had an AGR report approved and the other participating companies have data to produce their AGR reports. Once the machine manufacturers have had their report approved, it is possible for sawmills that use sorting machines from them to sort construction timber from contorta. Results from the project show that contorta pine has both lower bending strength and stiffness than domestic pine, which was expected due to the higher growth rate. However, it should be emphasized that grading could give a high yield for strength class C16, which is good enough for many purposes.

This is an article from our magazine Trävärden, view it here! (Link)

To reduce climate impact and the depletion of the Earth's resources, we need to switch to more sustainable materials. Material transition is about replacing resource-intensive materials with more sustainable alternatives. It can be about the raw materials, moving from using a finite resource, such as oil, to a renewable raw material, such as wood. It can also be about switching to circular production processes, i.e. we try to reuse and recycle the materials already in circulation as raw materials for new materials and products. The construction sector uses a lot of glued wood products, such as chipboard, plywood, glulam beams and cross-laminated timber. The glues used today are almost exclusively fossil-based. The smaller of the two Swedish chipboard factories currently uses around 4,000 tons of fossil-based glue per year.

Protein glue, a new idea

Glued wood products were manufactured long before crude oil was available. Often with protein-based adhesives that had very good properties. One example is the glulam beams that support the roof of Stockholm Central Station, which were manufactured almost 100 years ago and still serve their purpose today. They are glued with casein glue, an adhesive produced from milk protein. Another bio-based alternative available on the market today is starch-based adhesives, which are used in the manufacture of corrugated cardboard, for example. Starch-based adhesives have also started to be used in the production of chipboard. Since starch can also be used as food for humans and animals, it is relevant to also look at other alternatives. Starting from an available resource, such as spent yeast, saves both energy and fossil-based raw materials without using additional land and water resources. For some time, RISE has been exploring the potential of using yeast protein from spent yeast as a raw material and has seen promising results both for glued wood products, such as plywood and chipboard, but also for corrugated cardboard. This is now being further developed in the Reflows project where spent yeast is used for the first time in a value chain for the production of new bio-based products.

- Spent yeast is a protein-rich waste stream that is continuously generated in our beer brewing process. It has traditionally gone to farmers where it has been used as pig feed or as a soil improver, but in this research project we are investigating whether there are also other uses. In the best case, we can link an entire value chain where glue is created from our yeast, which can then be used for our packaging," says Raimo Liikamaa, operations manager for the beer process at Spendrups Brewery in Grängesberg.

Yeast raw material is also generated from other fermentation processes, such as in wine production and in biorefineries. The amount of yeast raw material available in the world is thus very large and the potential for large-scale production of bio-based adhesives and other products is therefore good.

- Being able to use an existing residual product as a raw material to produce new products in demand seems urgent. We therefore want to develop an alternative to today's fossil-based and more resource-intensive adhesives based on spent yeast. The project is a first step, but in an extension it is also interesting to look at how the water in the residual stream can be utilized and whether the extracted protein can be suitable as feed. This is an extremely exciting project," says Marielle Henriksson, project manager and researcher at RISE.

It seems that the time is now ripe and the wood panel industry is ready to explore the possibilities of yeast protein. - Byggelit has always used wood raw material from Norrland forests, which we know is of high quality and as pure as possible. The development of the entire board industry has been at a standstill for several years and Byggelit sees the project as part of the new growth journey. We want to drive innovative solutions with the environment in the driver's seat where we see the customer benefit in the short and long term, says Kent Ögren, environmental / quality manager at Byggelit.

This is an article from our magazine Trävärden, view it here! (Link)

1. Sustainable forestry makes renewable material available and sets the basis for a circular wood value chain. The process then continues in the sawmill, where the aim is to convert as much of the raw material as possible into long-lasting products. One example of how we optimize the use of the raw material is the scanning of logs using image analysis and AI. Another example is wood drying, where large amounts of material are currently discarded due to the wrong drying method. Here, traceability, data management, sorting and standardization are important methods that are being refined to make the best use of the material. Another example is the possibility of including other tree species and recycled timber in the process to increase biodiversity and adapt the forest to climate change.

2. When developing new materials and wood products, the aim is often to reduce dependency on fossil raw materials and extend their lifespan. One example is the project "100% fossil-free boards" where RISE, together with industry, has evaluated fossil-free glue for wooden boards. Another example is the development of new, less environmentally harmful wood protection treatments to extend the life of wood products. It is also possible to develop treatments that increase the protection of wood against moisture and fire.

3. The wood products will be used in buildings, interiors or furniture. RISE is involved in many projects together with industry to make production more resource efficient, with a lower carbon footprint. Part of this is to find new solutions for building components with high carbon footprints, but equally important is to prepare for flexible use, renovation, refurbishment and reuse when the first manufactured product has reached the end of its life.

4. In order to create buildings with a long lifespan and with conditions for reuse, it is essential that they meet the quality requirements of today and in the future. This means ensuring that products are safe in terms of strength and fire and moisture resistance and that they guarantee a good living environment in terms of, for example, sound and indoor climate. Part of this is to show how wood can be used in new types of structures such as high-rise buildings, hospitals or wind turbines.

5. To close the value chain, systems are important to preserve and care for the products produced and used. This means being able to recycle the products or materials. One way could be to use the equipment already available in sawmills to check the quality of the recycled material. When the material is finally used up, it can be recycled for energy and returned to the carbon dioxide sequestered in the forest.

This is an article from our magazine Trävärden, view it here! (Link)