ABSTRACT
The practicing resin formulation chemist uses all the scientific and observational tools available to develop products and to solve wood bonding problems. Wood bonding technology has evolved into a complex interdisciplinary science involving fields of chemistry, engineering, and materials science, as well as wood science and wood technology. Steiner and Warren used torsional braid analysis to compare rigidity and damping responses during and after cure for four different wood-adhesive systems that included phenol-formaldehyde, urea-melamine-formaldehyde, polyvinyl acetate, and phenol-resoreinol-formaldehyde resins. The vast majority of literature before the 1960s dealt with identification and quantitation of the initial reaction products of phenol with formaldehyde, and reaction kinetics. Early work in the field of structural elucidation of phenolic resins utilized infrared spectroscopy and gave an indication of the types of functional groups present. The application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to resin structure elucidation has enhanced the authors' ability to resolve isomeric structural peculiarities and to quantitate their presence.
