Measuring interfacial stiffness of adhesively bonded wood

Adhesive bond line stiffness is an important property that plays a significant role in the properties of wood composites, but is typically ignored by methods used for characterizing adhesive quality. This paper proposes a new test method that can measure effective bond line stiffness. The experiments measured the global stiffness of double-lap shear specimens and then calculated an adhesive stiffness property using shear-lag analysis of each specimen’s specific geometry and layer properties. Experiments were done for phenol formaldehyde (PF) and polyvinyl acetate (PVA) bonding wood strands of hybrid poplar and densified hybrid poplar. The stiffness of PF bond lines was an order of magnitude higher than PVA bond lines, and both were affected by the amount of adhesive coverage. The bond line stiffness with densified wood was similar to, or higher than undensified wood despite the lack of penetration of resin into the densified strands.