Using Reliability Tools to Characterize Wood Strand Thickness of Oriented Strand Board Panels

Oriented Strand Board (OSB) is an important engineered wood product used in housing construction which has a lower environmental impact or "carbon footprint." In this paper, reliability and statistical tools are applied to gain insights on the strand thickness of OSB panels. An OSB panel consists of several hundred wood strands that are resinated and pressed. The variability of OSB strand thickness for six manufacturers in the Eastern United States is examined as a whole, as well as individually. Little research exists on OSB strand thickness across mills even though strand thickness variability has been documented in laboratory experiments to greatly influence the dimensional stability of OSB panels. Our aims are to quantify and characterize strand thickness, plus apply reliability techniques, such as Kaplan-Meier curves, to characterize the probability of strand thickness. We further explore graphically and statistically the thickness of the strands.