ORIGINAL Poplar wood heat treatment: effect of air ventilation rate and initial moisture content on reaction kinetics, physical and mechanical properties Giacomo Goli • Bertrand Marcon • Marco Fioravanti Received: 17 April 2014 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Abstract The kinetics of heat treatment as well as its effect on some physical and mechanical properties of poplar wood (Populus alba L.) were analysed in this research. Kinetic tests were performed at different treatment temperatures and two different air ventilation settings [low and high air exchange rate (AER) with the exterior]. The treatment kinetics was studied, starting from the oven-dry condition, according to the mass loss during time. The time–temperature equivalency was checked, the mass loss versus time formalised through a master curve. The analysis clearly showed how the heat treatment at low and high AER presents different degradation kinetics even if similar activation energy values were found. Some physical and mechanical properties of wood after treatments up to a mass loss of 7 and 10 % starting from oven-dry or standard environmental conditions state were also studied. All of the treated samples showed statistically significant differences compared to the untreated one. The treatments performed at 7 or 10 % of dry mass loss showed homogeneous behaviour. The same tendency was observed for the treatments starting at oven-dry or standard environmental conditions with the exception of Young’s modulus, which resulted in smaller reductions in wet starting condition when compared to dry samples. Introduction Heat treatment is a process widely used to enhance wood stability, durability and aesthetics. Because heat treatment involves a large number of variables such as temperature, time, type of atmosphere and treatment sequence, a large number of G. Goli  B. Marcon (&)  M. Fioravanti Dipartimento di Gestione dei Sistemi Agrari, Alimentari e Forestali (GESAAF), Universita ` di Firenze, Via S. Bonaventura 13, 50145 Florence, Italy e-mail: bertrandmarcon@hotmail.com 123 Wood Sci Technol DOI 10.1007/s00226-014-0677-5