Mechanism of Electrical Conduction in Wood

In this paper the authors apply to wood a recent hypothesis regarding electrical conduction in textile fibers. They present and examine the proposal that the large increases in electrical conductivity of wood with increasing moisture con tent are due primarily to an increase in the number of the ions available for conduction, resulting from the increasing degree of dissociation of electrolytes. They applied the principles of Hearle’s hypothesis to wood. He states there are two factors which affect the resistance to wood to the passage of electric current: The number or concentration of conducting ions in the wood, and the mobility of existing charges. They conclude that the Hearle dissociation hypothesis provides a tenable explanation of the mechanism of electrical conduction in wood. The variation of the dielectric constant with moisture content and temperature from direct measurements is approximately as predicted by the hypothesis. Some of this agreement may be fortuitous, since the dielectric constant varies with frequency, and the data on dielectric constant used in testing the Hearle hypothesis were confined to a small range of frequencies in the radio-frequency region.

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