Engineered Polysaccharides as Performance-Enhancing Additives in Wood Adhesive Applications
An engineered polysaccharide additive, alpha 1,3-glucan, offers formulation options for wood adhesive systems to advance performance and sustainability.
Construction markets continue to grow, along with the demand for the required material categories such as wood adhesives. An increased industry focus on compliance with emission regulations and other environmental standards is driving developments, as well as the increasing overall interest in more sustainable adhesive technologies. The use of feedstocks such as bio-based building blocks in adhesive components is part of that interest, with a special focus on sources from fungible feedstocks, sustainable production, and the potential to achieve sufficient scale.
Emerging new adhesive formulations utilize various natural or bio-derived materials such as proteins, lignins, or starch derivatives for particleboard (PB), medium- and high-density fiberboard (MDF and HDF, respectively), plywood, and oriented-strand board (OSB). Typically, these types of materials are structurally ill defined, with high compositional variability, and are often based on regional, seasonal, and overall constrained supply chains.