Effects of heat pretreatment of starch on graft copolymerization reaction and performance of resulting starch-based wood adhesive

In this study, effects of starch heat pretreatment at 70, 80 and 90 °C on graft copolymerization reaction with vinyl acetate (VAc) and the performance of the resulting starch-based wood adhesive (SWA) were investigated. It was shown that SWA pretreated at 90 °C achieved the best performance. At this temperature, the bonding capacity improved by 17.84% compared to the adhesive synthesized without heat pretreatment and the viscosity increased by 18.16% after 7 free-thaw cycles, much better than other samples. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and polarizing microscopy demonstrated that structures of starch granules were fully damaged after heat pretreatment at 90 °C. The reaction took place not only on the surface of starch granules, but also internally, leading to improvement in the grafting amounts and grafting efficiency by 42.86% and 39.03%, respectively. This was further confirmed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), Confocal Raman microscopy (CRM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), which also showed better reaction homogeneity both between different starch granules and from granule surface to its internal structure.