You are right on with this one, the majority of moisture carries out the end grain. The wood that am burning right now in the shop here is some white oak that was split yesterday.Cut it over a year ago, stacked it in rounds and tarped it for the winter.Burns just great without a bit of sizzle to it.
Besides, if wood is that scarce, you might want to jump on it. Sounds better than freezing.
Sorry.This is wrong.Take a 20" round and stack it and I'll split it in four.We'll measure moisture content after a year and I'll prove it to you (if your wood isn't rotten)Splitting the wood exposes much more of the grain and enhances drying.
How wood dries: the mechanisms of moisture movement
Water in wood normally moves from zones of higher to zones of lower moisture content (Walker et al., 1993). In simple terms, this means that drying starts from the outside and moves towards the centre, and it also means that drying at the outside is also necessary to expel moisture from the inner zones of the wood. Wood, after a period of time, attains a moisture content in equilibrium with the surrounding air (the EMC, as mentioned earlier).
[edit] Mechanisms for moisture movement
[edit] Moisture passageways
The basic driving force for moisture movement is chemical potential. However, it is not always straightforward to relate chemical potential in wood to commonly observable variables, such as temperature and moisture content (Keey et al., 2000). Moisture in wood moves within the wood as liquid or vapour through several types of passageways depending on the nature of the driving force, (e.g. pressure or moisture gradient), and variations in wood structure (Langrish and Walker, 1993), as explained in the next section on driving forces for moisture movement. These pathways consist of cavities of the vessels, fibres, ray cells, pit chambers and their pit membrane openings, intercellular spaces and transitory cell wall passageways. Movement of water takes place in these passageways in any direction, longitudinally in the cells, as well as laterally from cell to cell until it reaches the lateral drying surfaces of the wood. The higher longitudinal permeability of sapwood of hardwood is generally caused by the presence of vessels. The lateral permeability and transverse flow is often very low in hardwoods. The vessels in hardwoods are sometimes blocked by the presence of tyloses and/or by secreting gums and resins in some other species, as mentioned earlier. The presence of gum veins, the formation of which is often a result of natural protective response of trees to injury, is commonly observed on the surface of sawn boards of most eucalypts. Despite the generally higher volume fraction of rays in hardwoods (typically 15% of wood volume), the rays are not particularly effective in radial flow, nor are the pits on the radial surfaces of fibres effective in tangential flow (Langrish and Walker, 1993).
