Study on Rapid Measurement of Wood Powder Concentration of Wood-Plastic Composites using FT-NIR and FT-IR Spectroscopy Techniques

Abstract

Wood-plastic composite (WPC) is a promising and sustainable material, and refers to a combination of wood and plastic along with some binding (adhesive) materials. In comparison to pure wood material, WPCs are in general have advantages of being cost effective, high durability, moisture resistance, and microbial resistance. The properties of WPCs come directly from the concentration of different components in composite; such as wood flour concentration directly affect mechanical and physical properties of WPCs. In this study, wood powder concentration in WPC was determined by Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. The reflectance spectra from WPC in both powdered and tableted form with five different concentrations of wood powder were collected and preprocessed to remove noise caused by several factors. To correlate the collected spectra with wood powder concentration, multivariate calibration method of partial least squares (PLS) was applied. During validation with an independent set of samples, good correlations with reference values were demonstrated for both FT-NIR and FT-IR data sets. In addition, high coefficient of determination (R 2 p ) and lower standard error of prediction (SEP) was yielded for tableted WPC than powdered WPC. The combination of FT-NIR and FT-IR spectral region was also studied. The results presented here showed that the use of both zones improved the determination accuracy for powdered WPC; however, no improvement in prediction result was achieved for tableted WPCs. The results obtained suggest that these spectroscopic techniques are a useful tool for fast and nondestructive determination of wood concentration in WPCs and have potential to replace conventional methods.

A Feasibility Study of Wood-plastic Composite Paver Block for Basic Rest Areas

“…A total of nine compounding combinations were designed, as shown in Table 1, by varying the ratios of wood chips and PE, but the proportions of other ingredients was maintained as 17%. It should be noted that determination of wood content in the WPC is crucial and can be examined using either thermogravimetric analysis and Fourier transform near-infrared and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (Cho et al, 2016). Experiments were carried out to determine the optimal mixture with the highest flexural strength value and the least water absorption or dimensional swelling value.…”

Wood Species Classification Utilizing Ensembles of Convolutional Neural Networks Established by Near-Infrared Spectra and Images Acquired from Korean Softwood Lumber

“…A near-infrared (NIR) spectrum acquired from a surface of wood is a good example. The NIR region contains information about the chemical characteristics of the wood (Cho et al, 2016;Yang et al, 2017). Therefore, it has potential for the classification of wood species.…”

Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy for Classifying Lumber Species Using Their Near-infrared Spectra

“…The advantages of NIR spectroscopy are its nondestructive testing and rapid measurement capabilities (Blanco, 2002;Pasquini, 2003;Porep et al, 2015). In wood science, NIR application has been widely studied to determine the wood's physical properties (Schimleck and Evans, 2003;Jiang et al, 2006;Yang et al, 2017), chemical aspects (Alves et al, 2006;Watanabe et al, 2006;Üner et al, 2011;Cho et al, 2016), mechanical strength (Thumm and Meder, 2001;Zhao et al, 2009;Hovarth et al, 2011), and moisture content (Thygesen and Lundqvist, 2000;Eom et al, 2010;Chang et al, 2015;Yang et al, 2015). In this context, some classification studies using NIR spectroscopy have recently been reported because chemical composition varies by species.…”