Urea-melamine resins, current producers

TABLE 1 Major Current Producers of Urea-Melamine Resins" ... 

The term aminoplastics has been coined to cover a range of resinous polymers produced by interaction of amines or amides with aldehydes. Of the various polymers of this type that have been produced there are two of current commercial importance in the field of plastics, the urea-formaldehyde and the melamine-formaldehyde resins. There has in the past also been some commercial interest in aniline-formaldehyde resins and in systems containing thiourea but today these are of little or no importance. Melamine-phenol-formaldehyde resins have also been introduced for use in moulding powders, and benzoguanamine-based resins are used for surface coating applications. 

Both the wood-based panel industry and the adhesive industry show a high commitment to and great capability towards innovation. The best evidence for this is the considerable diversity of types of adhesives used for the production of wood-based panels. Well-known basic chemicals have been used for a long time for the production of the adhesives and their resins, the most important ones being formaldehyde, urea, melamine, phenol, resorcinol and isocyanate. The greater portion of the currently used adhesive resins and adhesives for wood-based panels is produced with these few raw materials. The how to cook the resins and the how to formulate the adhesive become more and more complicated and sophisticated and are key factors to meet today s requirements of the wood-based panel industry. 

It is worthwhile to review the U.S. market size for the four principal resins currently used in wood-panel products today (4 )- These are phenol-formaldehyde (PF), urea-formaldehyde (UF), melamine-formaldehyde (MF), and resorcinol-formaldehyde (RF) (Table III). When these production figures are compared to the quantities of lignin potentially available (Table II), it is immediately obvious that all wood adhesives could be replaced by only a very small fraction of the lignin produced annually during chemical woodpulping processes. 

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