Just in case anyone thinks this is all purely hypothetical... I have been doing trials and experiemnts for over a decade, many of them centered around oxygenation in addition to raw product development for my core product. In just 6 years, using charred staves and new make, I produced "bourbon" on par or better tasting than anything currently on the market at any price.
If you are fixated on that whole oxygen in the wood / breathing thing, here are some crude drawings of previous concepts:
In A, the stave is suspended vertically so the top portion is out of the liquid, allowing air to get it.
In B, the stave is suspended horozontally so part of it is still exposed to air.
In C, the closest approximation to a barrel (but again that doesn't actually matter), the wood staves actually form a barrier to air, just like in real barrels. By varying the size of the stainless steel etc container you can easily vary the ratio of liquid volume to wood surface area. You can also easily change the number of seams in the wood by chaning the width of the staves. In addition, a simple hose clamp is used to hold the staves together, allowing you to vary the pressure holding the staves together independent of clamping force holding the wood panel against the stainless steel container. This is vastly superior to other designs that tried to combine both of those forces into one leaky mess. In addition, a metal ring can lay flat ontop of the wood between the wood and the outer side of the clamps to help more evenly disperse the clamp force.
Why dont I sell this, and why would I just post these designs publicly???
Because across the board, I always got the best results by simply removing the staves at X interval to let them air dry and then placing them back in (in addition to using variable flow membranes etc, but I'm not giving any more details) for long term aging (over 6 months), plus it is exponentially more simple. Below 3-6 months of aging time you don't even have to worry about letting staves dry, or cycling air through the system because it makes no difference in regards to the wood interaction/aging. Obviously, using a "breathing/angels share" membrane has quality improvements in and of itself for alcohol as detailed in a previous blog post. An important point ChatGPT brought up that I didnt delve into is asking at what point or threshold any differences actually make a perceptable difference. I could write a white paper 100 pages long on that topic alone.
If someone out there is religious about barrels or simulating the air interactions that the alcohol industry is saying is magical in the most barrel looking way, while ignoring my results, maybe I'll start making and selling those.