This project was started on April 1, 1999 following recommendations at the fall 1998 Structural Board Association (SBA) Technical Committee meeting in Banff, Alberta to quantify the benefits of the GluScan resin distribution analyzer for measuring resin distribution in OSB.
Resin distribution refers to how resin is dispersed on strand surfaces after the blending process. The main attributes of distribution include resin coverage and resin spot size which both can change due to blending variables. To date, it has been unclear whether or not resin distribution is sufficiently important to require monitoring by the OSB industry. To answer this question, experiments have been designed in this project to quantify how selected panel properties including Internal Bond, Modulus of Rupture, Modulus of Elasticity and Thickness Swell are affected by different resin distributions from batches blended at the Alberta Research Council (ARC). The resin distributions studied in this project were intended to simulate actual mill conditions and were measured by optically scanning strand surfaces using an image analysis system (GluScan) developed by Forintek Canada Corp.
Finally, a mill case study was carried out to determine whether the laboratory results together with GluScan could be used to measure and characterize resin distribution from a mill production line.