Description
1st Paragraph: To maximize the use of forest resources and to minimize wood product costs, most wood products use adhesives in their processes. Bonding wood not only requires fulfilling normal adhesion criteria, but also needs to deal with the porosity, composite nature, and anisotropic character of wood. Most adhesives will develop good wood bonds, but few hold up to the dimensional changes caused by moisture changes in the wood. Although the durability of wood products has met most of the market needs, the adhesive is a large part of the cost of the bonded product and lower cost, greener adhesives are desired. However, the complexity of wood–adhesive interactions across length scales hinders efforts. Our work involves applying new tools to study the interactions of adhesives with wood at the centimeter to nanometer scale and using a wide variety of methods to understand the where and why of failure.
Authors: Charles R. Frihart, Christopher G. Hunt, Nayomi Z. Plaza, and Joseph E. Jakes
Keywords: Wood bonds, Failure, Microscopic, Spectroscopic, Cellular, Cell Walls