At Work Package 7, our partner CESEFOR is making progress on the tests of particleboard
During these last months we have been carrying out all the testing for the mechanical properties of the particleboard manufactured out of the biomass from the tree and shrub species selected in the first stage of the project.
Briefly, we manufactured five boards per species and, after sanding, edging and cuting the required specimens, we evaluated moisture content (EN-322), density (EN-323), thickness swelling (EN-317) and water absorption, as well as bending strength (EN-310) and internal bond (EN-319).
Some of the tests were quite straight forward, some (EN-310 and EN-319) were more laborious and required a bit of adjustment. Overall, we are happy with the results and think that, with a bit of process optimisation, we will be able to produce high quality particleboard from the species selected for the second stage, especially Ulmus pumila, which happened to produce a quite strong board! Shrubs, however, might be a bit more challenging.
In the meantime, we have also received the results from the pulping trials, which produced surprisingly good results. We didn’t hold out much hope for most of the BeonNat species but the results showed, unexpectedly, high viscosities and low Kappa numbers for a lot of them (a big hurray for Cytisus scoparius!). We can be confident that we could, at least, make a good packaging paper out of the majority of our species.
We will keep on working and reporting with the rest of the results.
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