Wettability of modified wood

Abstract: Despite many excellent properties of wood which make it suitable for many applications, it suffers from a number of disadvantages limiting its use. For instance, modification is needed to reduce water sorption and to improve decay resistance, dimensional stability and weathering performance. In addition, wood/liquid interaction such as water wettability on wood plays an important role in design and characteristics of many processes and phenomena such as adhesion, coating, waterproofing, wood chemical modification, and weathering. This thesis focuses on enhancing the understanding of wetting of wood, with emphasis on modified wood. The influence of surface chemical composition of wood and its microstructural characteristics on wetting and swelling properties has also been studied.A multicycle Wilhelmy plate technique has been developed to evaluate wetting properties of porous materials, such as wood, in which the samples were subjected to repeated immersions and withdrawals in a swelling liquid (water) and in a non-swelling liquid (octane). This method was utilized to dynamically investigate contact angle, sorption and swelling properties, as well as dimensional stability of unmodified, chemically and surface modified wood samples. Scots pine sapwood and heartwood samples were utilized to establish the principles of the technique. Acetylated and furfurylated wood samples with different level of modification were thereafter examined utilizing the developed technique for wetting measurements. A perimeter model based on a linear combination of the measured force and final change in sample perimeter was suggested to evaluate the dynamic dimensional stability of wood veneers. The feasibility of this method for studying dynamic wettability was investigated by measuring the changes of advancing and receding contact angles over repeated cycles on surface modified wood samples, created by combining liquid flame spray and plasma polymerisation methods. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and X-ray computed tomography (XCT) were employed to study the surface chemical composition and microstructural properties of the samples, respectively.Three different kinetic regimes were observed in the wetting measurements: i) fast wetting and spreading of the liquid on the wood surface, ii) void filling and wicking and iii) swelling, which was the slowest of the three. The multicycle Wilhelmy plate method was found to be suitable for studying liquid penetration, sorption, and dimensional stability of swelling materials. The results demonstrate that the wetting properties of wood are highly affected by surface chemistry and microstructure. It was shown that using both swelling and non-swelling liquids in wetting measurements allow to distinguish between capillary liquid uptake and swelling. Based on this, for chemically modified samples, it was demonstrated that acetylation mostly reduces swelling, while furfurylation reduces both swelling and capillary uptake. This is in line with the microstructural study with X-ray computed tomography where a significant change in the porosity was found as a result of furfurylation, conversely acetylation left the total porosity values unchanged. Wetting results for hydrophobised wood samples demonstrate that the multi-scale roughness obtained by combination of nanoparticle coating and plasma polymerization increased both the hydrophobicity and the forced wetting durability compared to the micro-scale roughness found on wood modified with plasma polymerisation alone.