Overview of Wood Plastic Composites: Focusing on Use of Bio-based Plastics and Co-extrusion Technique = Overview of Wood Plastic Composites: Focusing on Use of Bio-based Plastics and Co-extrusion Technique

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Wood filler is a porous and anisotropic material having different size, shape, and aspect ratio. The use of wood fillerssuch as wood particle, wood flour, and wood pulp in wood plastic composites (WPCs) are growing rapidly becausethese wood fillers give improved strength and stiffness to WPCs. However, the wood fillers have originally poorcompatibility with plastic matrix affecting the mechanical properties of WPCs. Therefore, to improve compatibility betweenwood and plastic, numbers of physical and chemical treatments were investigated. While the various treatmentsled to improved performances in WPC industries using petroleum-based plastics, full biodegradation is still issues dueto increased environmental concerns. Hence, bio-based plastics such as polylactide and polyhydroxybutyrate having biodegradablecharacteristics are being applied to WPCs, but relatively expensive prices of existing bio-based plasticsprevent further uses. As conventional processing methods, extrusion, injection, and compression moldings have beenused in WPC industries, but to apply WPCs to engineered or structural places, new processing methods should bedeveloped. As one system, co-extrusion technique was introduced to WPCs and the co-extruded WPCs havingcore-shell structures make the extended applications of WPCs possible.