Comparison Study of Thermal Decomposition Characteristics of Wattle & Pine Tannin-based Adhesives

This study investigated the thermogravimetric analysis of two types of cured tannin-based adhesives from wattle and pine, with three hardeners of paraformaldehyde, hexamethylenetetramine and TN (tris(hydroxyl)nitromethan), at a temperature of 170℃ and a heating rate of 5, 10, 20 and 40℃/min for 10 minutes. The 5 minutes cured wattle tannin-based adhesive with each hardener at 170℃ was also tested to compare the degree of curing. It was found that thermogravimetric analysis could be used to measure the degree of curing of a thermosetting adhesive. The TG-DTG curves of all the adhesive systems were similar and showed three steps in a similar way to a phenolic resin. This means that each adhesive system is well cross-linked. However, a high thermal decomposition rate was shown at 150 to 400℃ in the case of the pine tannin sample with TN (tris(hydroxyl)nitromethan). The Flynn & Wall expression was used to evaluate the activation energy for thermal decomposition. As the level of conversion (𝛼) increased, the activation energy of each system increased. The activation energy of the wattle tannin-based adhesive with paraformaldehyde was higher than the others.