Résumé
To understand wood macroscopic behaviour, it is useful to know its properties at the microscopic level. For this, several imaging techniques can provide information about the geometrical structure in 2 or 3 dimensions, chemical composition, density, crystal lattice and crystal orientation. Wood mechanical properties are determined either by testing isolated fibre, or trough modelling based on stiffness data of the various cell wall components obtained outside the cellular context. Only nanoindentations methods can be used to estimate in situ mechanical properties on a limited number of sites. On the other hand, this can be done on high stiffness materials (metals, glasses, ceramics...) by using acoustic microscopy. To apply this technique to wood, experimental procedure should be assessed. Trials on a scanning acoustic microscope show that for high resolution images, thin slices (approximate to 5 mu m) after resin inclusion with water or potassium iodure as coupling liquid respectively at 600 MHz or 1 GHz give good results giving way to quantitative measurement of cell wall stiffness by image analysis.