Participation of Assira Keralta in the Forest Products Society Annual International Conference
Assira Keralta, a doctoral student in wood and bio-based materials engineering under the supervision of  Véronic Landry and Julien Chamberland, attended the «Forest Products Society Annual International Conference», held June 6-8, 2023 in Morgantown, West Virginia, USA, and presented her research project entitled «New technology for wood stabilization from whey ultrafiltration permeate».
This was an excellent opportunity to share her research results via a poster on an international scale, and to expand her fields of expertise, as well as develop her networks of contacts by exchanging with various stakeholders, thanks to the CRMR’s student mobility financial aid program and Laval University’s international office, AÉLIES.
Congratulations to Assira Keralta, and we wish you every success in your research career!
Research project summary
Numerous technologies have been developed to increase the dimensional stability of wood and strengthen its resistance to microorganism attacks. These technologies allow to increase the service life of the wood material as well as its outdoor use in an environment subject to strong variations of climatic conditions. This project consists of developing a new technology for wood stabilization using local raw materials: a mixture of whey ultrafiltration permeate (a co-product of whey rich in lactose) and carboxylic acid from the whey ultrafiltration permeate is impregnated into the wood via vacuum impregnation and esterified in the wood by heating. The dimensional stability, the stability of the impregnations in the wood and the density of treated samples are determined. The resistance to fungal attack, hardness, abrasion resistance, bending strength, modulus of elasticity as well as the degradation kinetics during accelerated aging and in real life aging tests are determined. In order to extrapolate this new biobased technology to several native species, the wood of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides), sugar maple (Acer saccharum), white pine (Pinus strobus) and black spruce (Picea mariana) are used during this project.