Investigation of mechanical and physical properties of glass fiber reinforced fiber plates (MDF) produced from agricultural wastes

Forestry and forestry products play an important role in the economic development of countries. Especially the furniture sector is an open sector with innovations that continuously increase exports because of the high variety of materials and products. However, the recovery of natural resources such as forests requires long time after consumption. Therefore, the use of these resources and earning the resources economically should be the most productive. In this context, it would be more appropriate to use wood based composite materials instead of massive wood materials, which is the main raw material of furniture sector. In this study, the use of agricultural wastes such as walnut shells and sunflower stalks as a filler material in the production of medium density fiberboards (MDF) has been investigated. The annual production of these wastes in our country is quite high. In this work using phenol formaldehyde resin as binder, the changes in mechanical and physical properties of fiber plates doped with glass fiber at different ratios were investigated. Experimental results show that physical (thickness swelling % and water absorption %) and mechanical (bending strength, compressive strength, modulus of elasticity, hardness and shearing force) properties of the plates are variable depending on the amount and type of woody raw material in the cellulosic structure and also amount of resine used in fiberboard production. However, most fiber plates produced in this study show the desired values in the standards. Because of the improvement of the mechanical strength of plates produced with glass fiber, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to evaluate the production of agricultural wastes doped with glass fiber economicallys.