Blogging
From Abroad

After three posts dealing with travelling around and leisure it’s time to focus on my classes. My major is Wood Technology as you maybe know. And I am very glad that I have the opportunity to take a graduate course here. Though most of the exchange students already finished their bachelor, it is normally impossible to take graduate courses for them. I really don’t know why.

But I didn’t accept that and inquired at Prof. Dawson-Andoh that I really wanted to take his graduate class and with his support it was not a big deal. And eventually I was accepted for Advanced Wood Chemistry.

This course, actually, is a reasearch project where we try to determine wood chemical properties by spectroscopy. This means that wood is exposed to electromagnetic beams. Simultaneously the reflection from the surface is mesured. The bottom line is that we are trying to develop a method that allows us to mesure the content of sugars and wood preservatives just by recording the reflection of certain beams.

Right now my task is to determine the characteristical reflection of wood preservative ingredients. Therefore I have 20 small bottles of each ingredient. I take some milliliters of this liquid and put into a small cuvette. This cuvette is placed in a dark environment to prevent tampering of the mesurement caused by the daylight. The radiation is a kind of LASER beams. These are generated in the blue box left of the laptop, the mesurements are taken beneath the black hut right of the laptop. By the way, did you know that LASER is an acronym for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”?

After I’m done with the mesurements we will evaluate the data and try to develop a model using statistical software. This model could allow us to calculate the content of wood preservative just by mesuring the reflection. The conventional way how to determine this is to destroy the wood and apply wet chemistry. So our method would be faster and hence quite useful.