Performance of glyoxal-resorcinol-based aqua gel and its activated carbon for the production of environmental-friendly bagasse composites

This work deals with the evaluation of the ability of resorcinol-glyoxal based aqua-gel (AG) and its activated carbon (ACAG), as new formaldehyde scavenger, to provide low toxic urea formaldehyde(UF)-bagasse composite. Preliminary studies were carried out to evaluate the adsorption capacity of ACAG, via determining its texture parameters and adsorption of formaldehyde. The performance of the investigated scavenger-UF adhesive systems was evaluated in comparison with previously synthesized activated carbons based on gels from different chain length aldehydes. Further, the quality of final bagasse composites was evaluated by mechanical, water resistance and free-HCHO tests. The results show that the investigated ACAG has a promising effect towards HCHO adsorption (149 mg/g) compared to that obtained from previously published gel-activated carbons (max. 109 mg/g). Both AG and ACAG provide improvement in properties of the resulted bagasse composites. The greatest improvement in static bending was noticed by applying AG-UF adhesive system (MOR: 32.2 MPa and MOE: 2026 MPa); these values exceed the ANSI standard requirements for grade H-3, while the internal bond strength (0.51 MPa) exceeds the M-2 grade. Applying the ACAG-UF adhesive system provides greater reduction in free-HCHO of the produced boards (similar to 47%) than the AG-UF adhesive system (27.3%).