Recent Advances on the Development of Protein-Based Adhesives for Wood Composite Materials-A Review.

The industrial market depends intensely on wood-based composites for buildings, furniture, and construction, involving significant developments in wood glues since 80% of wood-based products use adhesives. Although biobased glues have been used for many years, notably proteins, they were replaced by synthetic ones at the beginning of the 20th century, mainly due to their better moisture resistance. Currently, most wood adhesives are based on petroleum-derived products, especially formaldehyde resins commonly used in the particleboard industry due to their high adhesive performance. However, formaldehyde has been subjected to strong regulation, and projections aim for further restrictions within wood-based panels from the European market, due to its harmful emissions. From this perspective, concerns about environmental footprint and the toxicity of these formulations have prompted researchers to re-investigate the utilization of biobased materials to formulate safer alternatives. In this regard, proteins have sparked a new and growing interest in the potential development of industrial adhesives for wood due to their advantages, such as lower toxicity, renewable sourcing, and reduced environmental footprint. This work presents the recent developments in the use of proteins to formulate new wood adhesives. Herein, it includes the historical development of wood adhesives, adhesion mechanism, and the current hotspots and recent progress of potential proteinaceous feedstock resources for adhesive preparation.

Single source precursor route to nanometric tin chalcogenides.

Low-temperature solution phase synthesis of nanomaterials using designed molecular precursors enjoys tremendous advantages over traditional high-temperature solid-state synthesis. These include atomic-level control over stoichiometry, homogeneous elemental dispersion and uniformly distributed nanoparticles. For exploiting these advantages, however, rationally designed molecular complexes having certain properties are usually required. We report here the synthesis and complete characterization of new molecular precursors containing direct Sn-E bonds (E = S or Se), which undergo facile decomposition under different conditions (solid/solution phase, thermal/microwave heating, single/mixed solvents, varying temperatures, etc.) to afford phase-pure or mixed-phase tin chalcogenide nanoflakes with defined ratios.