Search

A wood-based sandwich panel with a corrugated core was developed as a building material. A matched-die mold manufactured from commercial plywood was used to fabricate the corrugated panels through a cold)forming process. A cold-setting resin was applied on southern yellow pine (Pinus spp.) veneers with an average thickness of 4 mm, and four plies of them were formed into a corrugated geometry using a wooden mold. When the resin was cured, the corrugated panel of veneers retained the corrugated shape after load removal. Facesheets of the sandwich structures were fabricated using three plies of the same veneers. To evaluate the effect of this corrugated geometry on the structural performance, the same veneers — regarding number, thickness, and orientation — used for the sandwich panel were adopted to fabricate laminated flat panels. Both sandwich and laminated flat panels were submitted to a four-point bending test. The results confirmed the sandwich effect, i.e. a 1741% increase in the bending stiffness of sandwich panels compared to that of laminated flat panels. Sandwich panels developed in this study were compared to Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), wood)framed structures known as stud walls, and sandwich panels produced using a hot-pressing technique. The cold-formed sandwich panels had higher structural performance than commercial building materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A wooden matched-die mold was manufactured to develop wood-based corrugated panels. Wood veneers brushed with resin were cold pressed between the mold halves and formed into a corrugated geometry. The corrugated panels were used as a core and bonded to flat veneer-based facesheets to develop sandwich panels. The whole manufacturing process involved a cold-forming technique that allowed panels to be produced with no heat. Specimens cut from both corrugated and sandwich panels were submitted to a four-point bending test to evaluate their structural performance. Adopting the same number of layers used to make the sandwich panels, flat panels were fabricated and tested to find the effect of this corrugated geometry and cold-forming process on the loadcarrying capacity of the sandwich structures. A comparison with flat panels made with the same stacking of veneers showed an increase of 272% of the bending stiffness of the sandwich panels, which is known as the sandwich effect. Comparison between the bending results of the panels developed in this study with those manufactured using thermoset resin and hot-pressing technique indicated that the cold-forming process using the wooden mold is an effective and inexpensive method to develop woodbased corrugated sandwich panels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]