Treesearch

United States Department of Defense munitions wood packaging materials (WPMs) are currently dip-treated with preservatives to protect the wood against decay fungi and termites. However, recent observations of mold on WPMs prompted research to evaluate the effectiveness of adding moldicides to the wood preservatives that are typically used on WPMs. Controlling moisture is the most effective way to prevent mold growth, but this is not always possible during WPM handling and storage. For this study, moldicides were selected based on compatibility with existing wood preservatives, commercial...

The interest in non-formaldehyde adhesives has reinvigorated studies using proteins from plant and animal sources, with an emphasis on plant-based sources, especially the oilseed plants such as soybean. Although animal-based sources have received much less attention, and ovalbumin from egg whites has not been studied at all, it provides a surprising low viscosity and high wet strength as a wood adhesive. Of the animal and plant proteins used in the past, egg protein has been used for centuries as a binder in tempera, for book illumination, and for gilding, but not as a water-resistant wood...

Maleic acid (MA), a solid dicarboxylic acid can be obtained from renewable lignocellulose, was used to extract lignin through flow through (FT) process for the first time. Due to the high boiling point and flash point of MA, the FT process was carried out at atmospheric pressure without VOCs release and explosion risk. 50 wt% MA aqueous solution could extract 60 % lignin from birch wood, and the dilution factor for precipitating lignin was only 3. MA-extracted lignin preserved more than 80 % of β–O–4 bonds and a monophenol yield (＞30 %) comparable to that of milled wood lignin was obtained...

This fully bilingual revised and expanded edition of the 2011 publication, Identification of Central American Woods, will serve as a field manual for the identification of the common commercial timbers of Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. It is intended as a tool for customs inspectors and other officials to control and regulate the flow of timber and wood products into and out of their countries and can be used as an academic reference to train wood anatomists.

Nickel (Ni)-lignin nanocomposites were synthesized from nickel nitrate and kraft lignin then catalytically graphitized to few-layer graphene-encapsulated nickel nanoparticles (Ni@G). Ni@G nanoparticles were used for catalytic decomposition of methane (CDM) to produce COx-free hydrogen and graphene nanoplatelets. Ni@G showed high catalytic activity for methane decomposition at temperatures of 800 to 900 °C and exhibited long-term stability of 600 min time-on-stream (TOS) without apparent deactivation. The catalytic stability may be attributed to the nickel dispersion in the Ni@G sample....

In this work, few-layer graphene materials were produced from Fe-lignin nanocomposites through a molecular cracking and welding (MCW) method. MCW process is a low-cost, scalable technique to fabricate few-layer graphene materials. It involves preparing metal (M)-lignin nanocomposites from kraft lignin and a transition metal catalyst, pretreating the M-lignin composites, and forming of the graphene-encapsulated metal structures by catalytic graphitization the M-lignin composites. Then, these graphene-encapsulated metal structures are opened by the molecule cracking reagents. The graphene...

Layers of cellulose nanofibers (CNF) have great potential to be used in food packaging applications because of their oxygen and grease barrier properties. However, because of their sensitivity to moisture, they likely will need to be used in a layered structure with water vapor barrier layers. Waterborne barrier coatings (WBBC) have the potential to provide this water vapor barrier, but their performance on paper with a CNF layer has not been described in the literature. Paper that had a CNF layer was coated with three different WBBC with various levels of two different barrier pigments to...

The brown rot fungus Fomitopsis pinicola efficiently depolymerizes wood cellulose via the combined activities of oxidative and hydrolytic enzymes. Mass spectrometric analyses of culture filtrates identified specific proteins, many of which were differentially regulated in response to substrate composition.

Knowledge of local mechanical behaviour of wood is especially important as silvicultural practices are modified to allow wood to compete as a relevant material in high technology applications. Challenges associated with identification of local mechanical behaviour have resulted in simplified test geometries designed to determine one or two constitutive parameters. The objective of this work was to design and simulate an entire experiment developed to simultaneously identify the earlywood and latewood orthotropic stiffnesses in loblolly pine in a single specimen and load geometry. The...

To better reserve food from the interaction with oxygen, moisture, and (light) ultraviolet (UV) radiation, typical polymer film packaging is produced as opaque or metalized sheets. There is increasing consumer demand for multifunctional transparent packaging or a transparent window to allow viewing of food before consumer purchase. Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), as a type of sustainable and biodegradable material, show great potential for transparent food packaging by providing good oxygen permeation resistance. However, CNCs are poor in preventing UV light transmission, sensitive to...