Investigating the use of wood-flour of hybrid populus (euphratica-alba) cultivar of “Mofid” in wood-plastic composite

Growing industrial trees is one of the solutions to overcome the wood resources lack. Thus, for efficient investment in wood cultivation, some cases such as annual growth of cultivated species, species adaptation to the climate of the region, adaptation to the soil of the culture site and also the quality of the produced wood and its capability as a raw material used in lignocellulosic industries, must be regarded. One of the recently introduced extremely fast growing poplar cultivars is the “Mofid” hybrid poplar (Populus euphratica Oliv. × P. alba L.). Since the wood and wood-waste produced during the wood mechanical conversion, are used as the main source in the wood-plastic composite production, in this study, the use of 4-year-old Mofid” hybrid poplar wood-flour as filler in the polyethylene wood-plastic production was investigated. Results indicated that the composites with Mofid poplar lignocellulosic filler had acceptable mechanical and physical properties, in a way that they were comparable with the composites containing hardwoods wood-flour filler (control treatment). Results showed that the plasticity and irreversible-strain during applying force were less in poplar filler-composites, so the tensile and flexural moduli were higher than control composites. Results indicated that the use of poplar wood-flour reduced the impact resistance value. Also, among the treatments of 20, 30 and 40% filler, the 30% filler treatment had the highest mechanical properties. All samples had acceptable water-absorption and thickness-swelling characteristics.