Recently, Professor Gao Zhenhua of the College of Material Science and Engineering successfully developed a new type of soybean protein adhesive for wood processing that uses soybean meal powder as its principal raw material. With its safety, environmental protection, excellent properties, and convenience of use, this kind of adhesive has applications in many wood-based panel enterprises.

At present, in China, “three formaldehyde” adhesives are still used to produce wood-based panels, which results in formaldehyde emission and other issues. It has become an important focus of research both at home and abroad in the wood industry to utilize sufficient biomass resources to research and develop high quality environmentally-friendly biomass adhesives.

China, as the world’s fourth largest producer of soybeans, creates a lot of soybean meal after the extraction of soybean oils each year. Soybean meal is primarily used as animal feed, which has a low added value.

Soybean meal, as a kind of high polymer biomass material, has disadvantages in its molecular weight, composition, and chemical modification, which result in the downsides of the traditionally produced soybean adhesives on viscosity, bonding strength and water resistance. Based on the composition and structure characteristics of soybean meal, our researchers, through molecular design and structural optimization, have developed a highly active, environmentally-friendly Modifying Property Agent( MPA), which can effectively interlink and disperse soybean meal powder to develop a new type of soybean adhesive with stable properties, low viscosity, high bonding strength and water resistance.

The most obvious advantage of the soybean adhesive is that it contains no harmful ingredients such as formaldehyde, phenol, or other organic solvents. And because it is safe and green, it can be applied in the production of formaldehyde-free wood-based panels. In addition, this kind of soybean adhesive has the characteristics of being easy to fabricate, having a long application period, convenient use, water resistance, and wide applicability. Therefore manufacturers may modulate the viscosity of soybean adhesive in the production of wood- based panels, and extend the adhesive period for 8 hours. The soybean adhesive can be used at room temperature, which means it can be widely used in base material production, such as plywood, joinery board, and parquet, as well as the covers of various wood-based panels, like particleboard, fiberboard, plywood, joinery board and so on.

The research and development on the technology has been subsidized by the Scientific Research Fund of Public Welfare Industry of Forestry，Heilongjiang Natural Scientific Fund, and the Scientific Research Fund of the Central Colleges and Universities of the Ministry of Education.