Wood welding: A challenging alternative to conventional wood gluing

The recent finding of a new way to assemble two pieces of wood by mechanically induced wood welding opens a new and challenging perspective for producing more environmentally friendly wooden products, i.e. without glue. This process, recently applied to solid wood, needs to be better understood in order to investigate the dependence of the variability of wood properties on the welding parameters. The two applications presented are the linear vibration welding and direct rotational friction welding. In each case different wood species were tested. In the most favourable cases the wood joints yielded structural grade strength. The resulting bond densification was analysed by the mean of wood density maps for oak, beech, spruce and pine. If this technique proves successful, it could change significantly the future of the furniture industry. The objectives of this article are to present the main results obtained so far and to suggest different research areas needed to improve this new way of jointing solid wood.