Wood Plastic Composite Board

Wood plastic composite board

Posted on April 28, 2012 by admin in Wood Plastic Product Physical and bending properties of injection moulded wood plastic composites boardsThere is increasing number of companies producing wood-plastic composite for structural applications. However, wood plastic composite (WPC) require solving two major constraints; Technique and formulation before their design value for structural application can be determined.

This study focused on solving the two major constraints by employed injection moulding method to produce WPC and using different commercial available coupling agents at different percentage to produce WPC. The effect of wood to plastic ratio was also evaluated on WPC produced using the coupling agents that gave highest bending properties.

Commercial polypropylene wood fine and coupling agents premixed in dumper mixer for 30 minutes prior to extrusion process at temperature of 190oC using 110 mm counter-rotating twin-screw extruder. The WPC boards with size of 150 mm x 150 mm x 3 mm were then injection moulded by 40-ton press moulding machine. From the result, WPC produced from coupling agents Exxelor PO 1020 at 4% significantly performed better in bending properties.

Further study on the effect of Exxelor PO 1020 percentage and the wood to plastic ratio showed that, WPC with 65% wood fine performed significantly better in MOR and MOE than other type of WPCs. WPC with 60% wood fine had significantly lower thickness swelling and water absorption compared to those 65% and 70% wood fine WPC. Conclusively, WPC with 65% wood fine is optimum content for WPC to produce from injection moulded method. Higher coupling agent percentage used in WPC formulation gave higher bending properties.

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in the development of construction and industrial products composed of wood fiber combined with thermoplastic resins. This mainly due to wood plastic composites (WPC) are renewable, less-abrasive to processing equipment, environmental friendly, low maintenance and similar as wood feature. The use of wood waste as filler make WPC promoted as environmental friendly products.

WPC and WPC process was patented in Italy around 1920s. In this process, polypropylene and wood floor were extruded to manufacture automotive interior parts. There was not much of an interest on this process until one American company implementing this Italian extrusion technology to produce automotive interior substrates (Clemons, 2002).

This has followed by other companies to produce various shapes of automotive parts by extruding polypropylene and wood floor mixtures. Applications for these composites include a variety of building products, consumer, industrial and automotive. Recently, WPCs have found application areas other than automotive industry such as siding, fencing, window frames and decking.

Especially after their use in decking applications, manufacturing of WPCs has seen phenomenal growth in the United States. It is well known that decking has a tremendous market in the USA with approximately 18.5 million m3 in 2000 (Winandy, 2004).