1. Introduction
Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is one of the major agricultural plantations in Malaysia. The oil palm is mainly planted for its oil which tree produced up to the tree age of 25 years old. After this age, it is usually harvested for replanting since the oil palm production is no longer economical. During replantation the land owners are face
with a big problem of disposal of felled oil palm trunks, which are generally left in field as waste without any particular uses. Malaysia can achieve a great potential to convert these trunks into value-added products having from palm plantations with 25 years rotations. Besides the fruit bunch as main product, the trunks also can be utilized as raw materials to manufacture panels such as plywood,
medium density fiberboard and particleboard.Furthermore,
the utilization of oil palm trunk could also reduce the demand traditional wood supply that comes from the forests. In Malaysia, rubberwood is the common species used to manufacture particleboard [1]. Therefore the utilization of oil palm trunk is considered as a
new source that can replace the rubberwood in panel manufacture. In a previous study Ahmad et al. [1] found that oil palm trunks can be used to manufacture of particleboards. In previous studies by Hashim et al. [2–4] and Baskaran et al. [5] indicated that oil palm trunk is also suitable for particleboards and has a big potential in their binderless manufacturing process of particleboard
manufacture.
Oil palm belongs to monocotyledon and its trunks consist of vascular bundles and parenchymas [6]. However, oil palm trunk has very low natural durability due to the existence of sugar and starch in oil palm parenchyma tissues. Due to a very high sugar and starch contents oil palm trunk is very susceptible to the attack
by biological agents such as termites and fungi [7]. Mhd Ramle et al. [8] determined that parenchyma cells have high capacity in absorbing water of water absorption as compared to that of vascular
bundles that could be related to their anatomical structure. This indicated that only vascular bundle is suitable for particleboard manufacturing. Therefore a proper treatment applied to the particles should be conducted to remove parenchyma tissues before they can be utilized effectively.
As food storage elements, parenchyma tissues contain sugar and starch, which are soluble in water and sodium hydroxide [7]. Ramli et al. [9] revealed that the pre-treatment of empty fruit bunch fibers with sodium hydroxide was more effective than removing the oil by water. However, the medium density fiberboard produced from empty fruit bunch fibers after water boiling
treatment when using resin at the level of 12% resulted in significant improvement in all of the board properties [10]. Both studies reported that treatments applied to empty fruit bunch fibers, such as boiling in water and sodium hydroxide significantly improved the properties of experimental medium density fiberboard panels.
However, the application of both treatments to particleboards manufactured from oil palm trunks is still not fully known and has not been studied in detail. Therefore the treatments of oil palm particles with hot water and sodium hydroxide were introduced to
increase the properties of particleboards. This paper proposes to study the potential and the effects of particles pre-treatment on the board properties.