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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter January 19, 2024

Elm wood (Ulmus rubra) vacuum drying at 40 °C studied by time domain nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR)

  • Rui Tan , Zhihong Zhao ORCID logo , Wenjing Liu , Shuang Wu and Minghui Zhang EMAIL logo
From the journal Holzforschung

Abstract

The time domain nuclear magnetic resonance (TD-NMR) technique was employed to distinguish various water states, and the moisture migration during Elm wood (Ulmus rubra) heartwood vacuum drying was quantitatively analyzed. The transverse relaxation time (T2) was employed to establish the correlation between drying time and moisture migration. Additionally, the longitudinal relaxation time (T1) was utilized to identify two types of water states within the cell wall: OH bound water (B-water) and more freely bound water (C-water). Meanwhile, the changes in these two types of bound water during the drying were investigated. The results demonstrated an exponential decrease in the content of OH bound water and more freely bound water with drying time. OH bound water within the cell wall predominated, with only a small portion of more freely bound water experiencing migration loss when the moisture content (MC) dropped below 20 %. Furthermore, OH bound water exhibited higher migration rate compared to more freely bound water at 10–20 % MC, while the motion of OH bound water molecules became highly restricted and stronger binding to cell walls than more freely bound water at a MC level of below 10 %. These findings yield a theoretical foundation and empirical support for optimizing drying methods.


Corresponding author: Minghui Zhang, College of Materials Science and Art Design, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot 010018, China, E-mail:
Rui Tan, Zhihong Zhao and Wenjing Liu contributed equally to this work.
  1. Research ethics: Not applicable.

  2. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.

  3. Competing interests: The authors state no conflict of interest.

  4. Research funding: This research is supported by Natural Science Foundation of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China (2023MS03027) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31860185 and 31960292).

  5. Data availability: The raw data can be obtained on request from the corresponding author.

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Received: 2023-08-01
Accepted: 2024-01-03
Published Online: 2024-01-19
Published in Print: 2024-03-25

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