Particleboard made from hammer milled black spruce bark residues

Summary  The disposal of bark residues is an important problem for the forest industry. An important proportion of the bark produced by the paper and lumber industries is used for energy production, but a significant amount of bark is still unused. The objective of this study was to determine the technical feasibility of making particleboards from black spruce bark residues bonded with urea formaldehyde resin and meeting the indoor performance requirements for wood particleboards. In the positive case, this would define a new use for black spruce bark residues. Fresh black spruce bark residues were obtained from a sawmill located in the northeast part of the province of Quebec, Canada. The bark was kiln-dried at 60 °C, the particles were generated from a hammermill and sieved. Particles from 0.02 to 2.0 mm were used in the surface layers and particles from 2.0 to 6.0 mm were used in the core layer. Particleboards of 540 × 560 × 16 mm were made with a laboratory hot press following a factorial design with two manufacturing variables at three levels: (1) wood particles content of the surface layers (0, 25, 50 percent); and (2) UF resin content of the surface layers (12, 14 and 16 percent) with a UF resin content in the core of 8 percent. This resulted in a factorial design of 9 different combinations repeated 3 times for a total of 27 boards. It was observed that the heating kinetics varied according to the wood particles content in the surface layers. The compression ratio of the mat and the board internal bond, modulus of elasticity, modulus of rupture, linear expansion and thickness swell were determined. The results show that it is technically possible to make particleboard from bark residues meeting the American National Standard Institute indoor requirement for wood particleboard under certain conditions. The modulus of rupture of the boards was the most critical property in this study. The best mechanical properties were obtained with a 50 percent wood content and 14 percent resin content in the surface layers. The particleboards produced in this study did not meet the minimal requirements for linear expansion. The temperature measurements performed in the core of the mat during hot pressing show that heat transfer improves with an increase in wood particles content in the surface layers. Received 15 June 1998