 NMP-2007-4.0-1 Advanced wood-based composites and their production
Technical content / scope: The market price on standard technology wood-based products is increasingly driven by low labour cost countries that have short timber harvesting cycles. The difference in production costs is so significant that improving production efficiency is not sufficient alone to maintain the competitiveness of the European forest-based industry. A strategy for success is to develop new high added value products produced by new resource efficient production concepts.
Wood as a natural and abundant composite can form the basis for a completely new industry based on intelligent recombination of specific physical properties such as heat insulation, conductivity and mechanical strength and shape in engineered wood products (EWP). For example, replacing lignin with silicon, geofiller or ceramics in the wood nano-structure, chemical grafting of cellulose or environmentally friendly chemical densification can yield radically new product properties. New wood and bio-fiber polymer composites (e.g. transformation of wood fibres and thermoplastic resins into wood polymer composites throughout plastic processing, injection moulding, extrusion or pultrusion) show high potential for construction, furniture and packaging applications. The ambitious research objectives include adaptive production concepts for new composites based on wood fibres, cellulose, lignin, or hemicelluloses, and their derivatives; manufacturing technologies such as moulding, shaping, compounding, melt blowing and electro-spinning; new manufacturing methods for sheet structures and converting operations that enable paper to replace non-renewable materials; engineering concepts for cellulose processing, e.g. melting and solid-state processing.
Funding scheme: Large-scale integrating collaborative projects
Specific features: In line with the objectives of this topic, adequate industrial participation is recommended. Although this is not a dedicated SME topic, a significant SME participation is nevertheless expected.
Expected impact: The expected strategic impacts include: (1) placing sustainability at the forefront of cost control and competitive advantage as well as emphasising its role in industry's social responsibility, and (2) addressing Health and Safety issues for both the worker and the consumer through promotion of intrinsically better technologies. More specifically, funded proposals are collectively expected to develop several new product families based on new production concepts that exploit the potential of wood-based composites across a variety of applications in the health, electronics and food sectors, as well as in the fields of construction, furniture, packaging, speciality papers, vehicles and textiles.
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