Abstract
Wood represents a major class of versatile materials in mechanics, comparable to metals onvarious criteria such as annual world production tonnage. The density of wood is 3 to 15 timeslower than that of metals, due to its cellular structure, whose walls are essentially made up oflayers of long-fiber nano-composites. This makes wood one of the most efficient materials formany applications. However, the knowledge of the transverse (ER radial modulus and ETtangential modulus) and shear (GRT, GLT and GLR) elastic properties of this orthotropic,heterogeneous, hygroscopic and variable material are still limited due to a lack of rapid andefficient characterization tools and methods. Currently, the existing technical data in databasesare incomplete for material selection since, generally, only the longitudinal elastic modulus isavailable, whereas the other elastic properties are essential for high-end and high-performanceapplications.The aims of this study are: to rapidly estimate as many elastic parameters as possible from asingle wood sample using the modal analysis of its vibrational impulse response; to investigatethe damping characteristics and relate them to viscous behaviour; to enrich the woods databasewith orthotropic elastic constants; and to analyze the correlations between macroscopicviscoelastic behavior and ultrastructural parameters, including density and microfibril angle (AlFay et al. 2022).