5.04.07 – Adhesives and gluing

Unit 5.04.07

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The working party provides information and coordinates research in the wood adhesives, gluing processes and glued products including their economics, their chemistry, their mechanics, and their importance. Adhesives and the physicochemical phenomenon of adhesion are important in over 70% of all wood materials in use today. This includes plywood and other laminated veneer products, particleboard, waferboard, oriented strand board, fiberboards, laminated beams, edge- and end-jointed products, furniture, overlays, most paper products, paints and finishes, and the like.

Over approximately the last fifty years, the production and use of adhesively-bonded, solid wood products has increased dramatically. This is due largely to the ready availability of low-cost adhesives.  These adhesives allow full utilization of the diverse and changing wood resource. This is especially important given the fact that the size of harvested trees has decreased. In order to obtain useful wood materials and to fully utilize wood resources, the smaller trees are reduced to veneers, flakes, or fibers that are then bonded with adhesives into useable products.  Thus, adhesives have made possible the economic production of a number of new, and often better, wood products, many of which can not be made from solid wood.

Given the smaller size of harvested trees, the need to recover a higher percentage of useable wood from each tree, the adhesive bonding of wood will continue to be a dominant wood processing operation into the foreseeable future. This requires that wood adhesives science and technology keep pace with other industrial developments by continuing to provide the forest products industry with adequate future supplies of durable adhesives and improve the efficiency, durability, and applicability of adhesives for bonding wood to wood and wood to non-wood materials.

Most conventional adhesives are mainly derived from petroleum which is nonrenewable resource. Eventually, supplies will diminish and prices continue to rise.  Developments of sustainable and environmentally acceptable wood adhesives from renewable resources are the focus.  Other areas of importance are to improve conventional wood bonding systems and processes to provide better cure and bonding and better product performance, to develop the technology to bond wood treated with preservatives, fire-retardants and dimensional-stabilizers, to develop bonding in wood/thermoplastic composites, and to develop a fundamental understanding of wood and its interactions with the adhesive.

This Working Party welcomes participations from anyone interested in the broad area of wood adhesives and wood gluing and its related aspects. If you have a specific interest in a particular topic you are encouraged to contact any of the leaders and become involved in our activities including technical meetings and exchanging ideas which can often lead to collaborative work.  Collaboration is one of the most valued aspects of IUFRO participation as it opens the collaborators up to cultural exchange as well as work related information exchange.

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