Development of Renewable Woodceramics Synthesized from Cashew Nuts Shell Oil

Abstract

The international issue to be addressed towards realizing a low-carbon society is to reduce the amount of carbon-based underground reserves such as coal, petroleum, and coke, and strongly encouraged to use carbon neutral biomass-derived resources. Woodceramics is a hybrid porous carbon material composed of wood-based biomass and phenolic resin, characterized by high far-infrared emissivity and large specific surface area. Woodceramics has been studied as heating elements and humidity and gas sensors, etc. If this is applied to the inner walls of aging and grain drying furnaces for vegetables and fruits, both ripening and drying are greatly promoted and fossil fuels used in boilers can be significantly reduced. In fact, it can produce black garlic with far infrared rays using a woodceramics brick efficiently. Furthermore, as a substitute for phenolic resin, if plant-based liquefied materials from cashew nut shell oil can be prepared and can be used for manufacturing woodceramics, then all carbon neutral circulating woodceramics made from wood-based biomass is possible to manufacture. On the other hand, woodplastics is a composite material that can be made of wooden materials and plastics, and able to expect the effective use of wood-based biomass and waste plastics.