IPB Discovered How to Improve Wood Quality by Utilizing Boron Solution

Compressed wood (CW) is a product make of recyclable materials which include small pieces of wood, sawdust, wood shavings all glued together with resins or other bonding agents. The use of resins does not make compressed board as eco-friendly as solid wood. The Compressed Wood Technology improves the integral strength of the wood whilst reducing the wear damage. After the wood has been processed it will retain its original appearance and grain texture, but has become stronger. In addition to temperature and duration of compaction, the success of the process is strongly influenced by pre-treatment applied before the wood is forged.

Research on the effect of pre-treatment on the quality of CW produced is still very limited especially to Indonesian timber forest. Therefore researchers from the Faculty of Forestry of Bogor Agricultural University (FAHUTAN IPB), namely Imam Wahyudi and Trisna Priadi, with Futoshi Ishiguri of Utsunomiya University, Japan, conducted research on the development of quality improvement techniques to produce the best solidified timber from Indonesian timber forest species.

The aim of this study was to study the effect of pre-treatment on the CW properties produced. Three types of timber forest plantations analysed, namely Jabon (Anthocephalus cadamba), sengon (Falcataria moluccana), and teak (Tectona grandis) were grown rapidly as samples.

The results of this study indicated that pre-treatment by preserving wood in boron solution is the best method, compared to other pre-treatments. Boron is a chemical element with symbol B and atomic number 5. Produced entirely by cosmic ray spallation and supernovae and not by stellar nucleosynthesis, it is a low-abundance element in the Solar system and in the Earth's crust. Boiling in cooking oil is not recommended because the wood becomes oily so difficult to finish. Similarly, the pre-treatment of direct drying in the oven because the resulting wood surface becomes cracked and broken. In general, compacted wood will be stronger, more stable and more durable compared to the control wood. (Wied)