Properties of oil-palm-shell-based phenol wood adhesives compared with petroleum-based phenol wood adhesives

Abstract

A study was carried out to test the properties of oil-palm-shell-based wood adhesives compared with petroleumbased wood adhesives. Shear strength tests for both dry and wet conditions were done. Besides that, apparent cohesive wood failure tests were also performed to compare the performance of wood bonding between these mentioned adhesives. For the dry test, the bonding performance became better when the formaldehyde to phenol (F/P) ratio increased. For all three different F/P ratios, the petroleum-based adhesives showed the best bonding performance. However, the wood bonding performance of oil-palm-shell-based adhesives was comparable with that of the petroleum-based adhesives. Meanwhile, for the wet test, the bonding performance became better when the F/P ratio increased and the best bonding performance was given by the petroleumbased adhesives with F/P ratios = 1.2 and 1.5. However, it was obvious that the performance of 50% oilpalm- shell-based adhesives was better than that of the petroleum-based adhesives at F/P ratio = 2.0. For apparent cohesive wood failure, the F/P = 2.0 group of samples and the petroleum-based adhesives gave the highest wood failure for all the compositions of adhesives. The commercial potentiality of this research is very high as the oil-palm-shell-based adhesives can replace the petroleum-based adhesives.