In wood industry, adhesive bonding is one of the key process steps. To ensure continuing technological progress in wood industry it is necessary to explore new possibilities of improvement in adhesive bonding. The potential routes for performance improvements suggested by a state of the art report issued by COST Action E13 - Wood Adhesion and Glued Products (Dunky et al. 2002) - focus very much on polymer chemistry, where tremendous improvements have been achieved in past decades. Based on the results achieved in own preliminary experiments, the authors of the present report think that also another well known component of adhesives in wood bonding, usually addressed under the term "filler", deserves more attention. As is well known from the science of composite materials (e.g. Chawla 1987), the addition of fibrous fillers significantly changes the physical properties of a polymer.
展开▼