Partitioning of Pine Bark Components to Obtain a Value-Added Product for Plywood Manufacture

Southern yellow pine (SYP) bark particles and bark extracts have been used only to a limited extent in wood-based composites due to poor performance relative to existing products and/or economic barriers. Our efforts to identify alternative applications for this biomass resource require the development of an improved understanding of the interrelationships between bark anatomy and chemistry. An intermediate level of processing, involving grinding and classification operations, was used to convert SYP bark into adhesive filler for plywood manufacture. This filler was lower in ash and extractives than another filler prepared by directly grinding the bark as received. Near-infrared spectroscopy was successfully coupled with multivariate analysis to develop a model to predict inner:outer bark ratios and thereby select preferred bark resources for this application.