2.3.

2 SAWDUST
From the creation of wood-based products, the forest sector generates a variety of
subsidiary industries. The saw-milling operation is one of the major sources of sawdust. The
amount of sawdust produced from saw-milling depends on the sawmill efficiency which can
be measured by the quality and quantity of sawn plank recovered compared with the resulting
wood waste. This wood waste is a combination of bark, sawdust, trimming, split wood,
planer shavings and sander dust (Ekhuemelo, D. and Atondo, T. 2015). The type of
machinery used also has a bearing on the quantity of sawdust generated. (Kambugu et al.
2005) observed that lack of proper machinery for the timber sawing leads to high generation
of saw dust in the timber sawing process.

Table 2.2

Table 1 lists the annual production quantities of sawdust in a few key global locations,
together with the amount of wood waste and sawdust produced by sawmills .It is noted
from Table 1 that in many timber producing countries, more that 2 million m 3 of saw dust is
generated annually from sawmilling operations. This indicates a huge environmental
challenge if this material is simply left as waste.

Sawdust is used in many applications, such as building materials, soil mulch, energy
production (gasification, incineration, and ethanol production), and low-quality wood pulp
(Shmulsky and Jones 2019). A considerable amount of sawdust and wood shavings in the
United States of America is utilised in the manufacturing of particleboards (Mayer, C 2002).
The global production of wood based panels that include particleboards, plywood, oriented
strand boards (OSBs) and fiberboards increased by 125% between 2000 and 2017 (Food And
Agriculture Organisation 2019)

Particleboards and related wood products such as low-density fibreboard (LDF), and
chipboard are manufactured by mixing various proportions of wood chips, sawmill shavings,
or sawdust with a synthetic resin or any suitable binder (Mamza 2014) In comparison to
wood fibres, sawdust particles have a low aspect ratio, which restricts their use in
conventional paper and board applications. A study by (Dotun, A.O. et al. 2018) observed
that sawdust particleboards produced from a combination of sawdust and polyethylene
terephthalate plastic waste was favourable for indoor applications. However, the study also
showed that these products had limited structural and load bearing applications. Similarly
(Akinyemi et al. 2016) recommended that panels produced as corncob and sawdust
composites using urea formaldehyde as binder were suitable for indoor uses in buildings but
not for load bearing purposes.

2.4.2 DENSITY TEST

Density is the measure of the weight per unit volume of solid or liquid samples. Density is
defined as mass per unit volume, and its calculation formula is presented below: ρ = m/V .
Measuring the density of cast iron in its molten state has proven not as straight forward as the
above formula might imply. Various methods have been employed based on the measurement
of buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure, volume, or shape (Saito, T; Shirashi, Y; Sakuma, Y 1969).
Some of the more frequent methods will be reviewed below. They all have their advantages
and disadvantages, and, while some of them are used mainly for measurements of other
properties, they are commonly used for density measurements as well. One of the things most
methods have in common is that the density must be calculated by one or several operations
from data obtained in a direct or indirect way.
Among various agricultural waste materials, wheat straw shows promising potential for
manufacturing particleboard. Wheat straw is a natural composite with
cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin as the main composition, and shows great potential to
produce particleboard of various density, including low-density (Wang and Sun, 2002),
medium-density (Mo et al., 2003), and high-density particleboards (Panthapulakkal and Sain,
2007), with the assistance of different binders such as urea formaldehyde (UF), phenol
formaldehyde (PF), methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) (Halvarsson et al.,
2008; Halvarsson et al., 2009; Mo et al., 2003; Tabarsa et al., 2011). Low-density
particleboard, typically in the range of 0.2–0.3 g/cm3, has application potentials in insulation,
packaging, filter, and lightweight core materials (Mo et al., 2001). Medium-density
particleboard is within a density range of 0.59–0.8 g/cm3 and has received more research
effort to improve its strength. 

2.5 CONCLUSION
This paper reviews the literature on each material and test for particleboard in this project.
From the research, chemical binder has more disadvantages compare to bio-resin. In this
project, bio-resin is used to bind the sawdust and rice straw. The particleboard will be test
with the sound absorption coefficient, density test and water absorption. Each test has each
standard the need to achieve. So, we target to achieve the standard by using the bio-resin
which is Damar and also can help to reduce the pollution during this project. Next chapter
will explain about how to produce the particleboard and testing that will be carried out.