Evaluation of the quality of wood used in social housing in Costa Rica

Abstract

In the construction process with wood, a rigorous evaluation of the quality of the implemented wood must be carried out, in order to have buildings with long life periods and optimal usability. However, there are limited methodologies available at the national level to evaluate the quality of wood in construction. Therefore, the objective was to evaluate the quality of the wood used in social housing. For this purpose, the INTE C99-2014 standard was implemented and the moisture content, dimensionality, visual quality and preservation of the wood were evaluated. The work was done with sawn wood products destined for the construction of houses of social interest. The supplier companies are located in Alajuela (Ecohouses) and Limón (ADITIBRI and SOMABACU) that implemented P. caribaea var. hondurensis, C. alliodora and Pinus sp.; in each site 10 sawn wood products were selected with repetitions of three to ten pieces. The pieces that showed the best results in terms of valuation were those of Pinus sp., being an imported material; it had a great uniformity and quality. In the case of the wood pieces of C. alliodora and Pinus sp. they presented fulfillments inferior to 60 % due to the heterogeneity of the materials, in many cases with contents of humidity superior to 30 %, with little control in the dimensionality and high presence of knots. Finally, in terms of preservation, specifically retention, none of the species achieved the minimum preservative concentration of 2.4 kg m^-3 .