The effect of cellulose fibres in an epoxy adhesive for bonding wooden load-bearing elements

Abstract

The work deals with the modification of the properties of epoxy adhesive. The modification consists of reinforcing this adhesive with cellulose fibres. In the field of wood glued elements, the current research focuses on the possibility of increasing the ductile behaviour of the epoxy adhesive, which would significantly increase the ability of the adhesive to transfer the stresses induced by the volumetric changes of the wood adherend. For this purpose, the adhesive was modified with fibres having a reinforcing character, which may include cellulose fibres. Due to the epoxy resin’s non-polar nature and the cellulose fibre's hydrophilic nature, which inhibits the fibre's homogeneous dispersion, the fibres have been modified with silanes. This paper describes the effect of adhesive modification by determination of tensile and shear strength at different amounts of filling and different types of silane pre-treatment of cellulose fibres. The optimum filling amount can be considered as 1.0% filling of nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) with epoxy-functional silane pre-treatment.