Synthesis and Characterization of Phenol/Urea/Formaldehyde and Clay Composites

Recently, so-called "phenol-formaldehyde-urea resins", which are generally made only by mechanical blending of UF resin and alkaline type PF resins, have been used as adhesives for the manufacturing of wood products. Faster curing PF resins can be also prepared by the addition of urea during or after the resin synthesis to yield co-condensed phenol-urea-formaldehyde (PUF) resins. In this study, resin/clay composites were prepared by in situ polymerization of phenol(18.2%)-urea(36.3%)-formaldehyde(45.5%) (PUF) with the various ratios of organoclay (7.69-45.45%) and colored organoclay (3.22-20.0%). The objective of our work is the investigation of the effect of addition of both organoclay and colored organoclay at different ratios on the textural characteristics. The composites are characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy techniques and using high resolution transmission electron microscopy images of the samples. It was found that clay layers exfoliated in the resin matrix.