Per: Juliana Peixoto Rufino Gazem de Carvalho (UENF), Amanda Mendes Ribeiro (UENF), Rômulo Leite Loyola (UENF), Juliana Soares de Faria (UENF), Felipe Perissé Duarte Lopes (UENF), Noan Tonini Simonassi (UENF), Carlos Maurício Fontes Vieira (uenf)
Abstract:
Wood is a strong and versatile natural raw material, which justifies its uses in civil
industry applications that vary between structures and aesthetic. Within the
perspective of materials sciences, wood can be understood as natural polymeric
matrices composite reinforced by natural lignocellulosic fibers. A type of wood that is
commonly used are those extracted from eucalyptus. Due to the adaptability of the
tree, alongside with the relative short growth period this variety is one of the most
cultivated in Brazil. Even with modern processing techniques, between 60 and 70%
of the tree is used as wood, which generates a large amount of waste that is normally
used as an energetic material. Thus, the objective of this work is to study the possibility of using waste from the timber industry as a reinforcement in polymer
matrix composites. The polymer in question is a vegetable polyurethane resin
derived from castor oil and the studied residue is wood chips taken from 3 different
stages of eucalyptus processing. As a method of characterization reinforced
composites between 10 and 40% in volumetric fraction of the 3 residues (RE1, RE2
and RE3) were individually made and subjected to tensile tests. The results show
that, in low volumetric fractions, the residues cause a decrease in performance. The
loss of performance is associated with the appearance of bubbles in the matrix and,
as the volumetric fraction increases, the residue tends to act as reinforcement and
the tensile strength has an increase of up to 40% comparing to pure resin.
